Five Books on the History of the Earth

Adam Maloof, on the swell site FiveBooks, highlights his reading list for books about the history of the earth. Maloof is an assistant professor of geology at Princeton University.

From said list...

Your next book is Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.

In many ways this book is like those disaster Hollywood films that are so popular today like The Day After Tomorrow or The Core, which take compelling scientific ideas and morph the timescales to that of human experience. In the films, directors always try to make the catastrophe as real as possible, and in the process lose the charm and wonder to ridiculousness.

In Cosmicomics Calvino also takes huge and relevant scientific ideas, transmutes time, and describes spectacular geological and astrophysical processes through the senses of the intrepid protagonist Qfwfq. But, rather than aiming for the false realism of Hollywood, Calvino lets the stories develop like fables or memories, always leaving me unbearably fascinated by the scientific idea, like a child getting read a bedtime story.

When I read this book for the first time in high school, I remember being absolutely astounded that the moon used to be closer to Earth. Of course people did not paddle boats out to the rising full moon and climb on to the scaly milky surface with a ladder like Calvino described in his book, but this fantasy inspired me to study the natural world, and in a more direct way, inspired my work on tidal rhythmites and history of the Earth-moon orbit.