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nelli_lakatos's review against another edition
4.0
“Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.”
This was a fascinating book that tells the story of the fossils found in the Burgess Shale in Canada.
This was an extraordinary read, wonderfully written and entertaining. I really enjoyed it and also learned from it!
I highly recommend to anyone interested in paleontology, evolution and the origin of life.
Thank you to @netgalley and the publisher for providing an AudioARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
This was a fascinating book that tells the story of the fossils found in the Burgess Shale in Canada.
This was an extraordinary read, wonderfully written and entertaining. I really enjoyed it and also learned from it!
I highly recommend to anyone interested in paleontology, evolution and the origin of life.
Thank you to @netgalley and the publisher for providing an AudioARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
elyssam's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
3.5
Wonderful Life audiobook is a great way to read the popular text and learn the details of the Burgess Shale. The Narrator was engaging. In a more academic focused non-fiction, a personal worry was that it would be read in monotone and not catch my attention but it was the complete opposite! It had many anecdotal elements as well as a hopeful tone about the natural history and science surrounding the Burgess Shale. I really enjoyed the comparisons to popular media: films, books, and poems. I wouldn’t necessarily reccomend this to every reader, I think having a interest in the subject would help reader’s/listener’s enjoy the book. I also think having a copy of the print or ebook would help people follow along better as a lot of information is packed in. Those with a trilobite interest and the ability to follow along to a science-laden text, this is the audiobook for you!
ailsaod's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Ok this book has pretty much single handedly re-ignited my interest in fossils. I already knew about the Burgess Shale from an Attenborough documentary but I had no idea about the sheer magnitude of stuff preserved there. I have not read a book by Gould before though I have certainly heard of him and this book is pretty challenging for a popular science book - I enjoyed it a lot but you will learn more than you ever wanted on arthropod leg arrangements. Also this book was published in the late '80s and I really want to know how our knowledge has improved since then.
I will say that it is probably best to have a pretty good understanding of evolution before going in as some of the Gould's opinions later on are on the controversial side.
elsiebrady's review against another edition
3.0
I learned more about the history of nature than I expected. Gould shares a new perspective of how life developed on earth based on the interpretation of fossils found in the Burgess Shale. The metaphor for life is don't get so caught up in your own paradigm of life that you can't look at things from another perspective; be open to new and innovation interpretations.
errogal's review against another edition
5.0
Everyone interested in science should read Gould's Wonderful Life. It was an extremely enlightening, detailed read about the finding of the Burgess Shale lagerstatten - and the bizarre creatures found within it. It's hard to imagine creatures such as the hallucigenia, anomalicaris, and the wiwaxia ever existed - yet they did - and it's only luck of the draw that they don't still exist today. The last few pages about the first chordate (the Pikaia) were absolutely mind-blowing. This book should be required reading for geology, biology, and marine science students - as it provides an incredible overview of an extremely rare event in the history of the earth.