Before reading this book, I had had a vague impression of James Lovelock as a woolly thinker - the man who wrote 'Gaia' and inspired googles of quarter-baked hippy ideas about how Mother Earth runs things. Insofar as I had an opinion about him, I changed it after reading this; written reasonably soon after Alvarez et al's hypothesis that a meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs, the book is extremely well-though-out and wide-ranging. Unlike 'T.Rex and the Crater of Doom', it goes in to some detail about what it was that enabled some creatures to survive while other species perished. The style is a little more technical than 'T.Rex...', and the book therefore less of a page-turner; the flip side of that, though, is that there is more to chew on.

Because 'The Great Extinction' was written in 1983 - when less of the facts about the cataclysm had been unearthed - there are most likely a few mistakes. Most notable among these is the authors' contention that the impact took place in the sea, probably in the northern mid-Atlantic; in fact, the meteorite seems to have struck Earth at the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. By and large, though, the book has aged extremely well.

Click here to buy it.