A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us--The Evolution of Life on Earth

Every step you take in A Walk Through Time moves you millions of years forward in Earth's history. Inspired by the idea of a one-mile stroll through the evolution of life, Sidney Liebes recruited some terrific writers and artists to create a traveling museum exhibit; A Walk Through Time summarizes the experience in book form, with the help of fascinating photos and intelligent, enjoyable text. The most profound realization along this temporal journey is just how small a part human history plays in the big time line. In the museum exhibit, where one foot equals one million years, human presence takes up all of one-thousandth of an inch; in the book's time line, we merit barely a speck. Our tiniest living fellows--the bacteria and blue-green algae, the amazing arthropods, the merging microbes--are the real stars of the show. Readers are treated to intriguing views of bizarre organisms like tardigrades, velvet worms, and lichens ("Taking everything we know about algae and fungi, we still never would have predicted the outcome of their synergy"), along with the microbes that once ruled the earth. Only at the very end of the line, long after the development of sexual reproduction, after the great Cretaceous extinction, after the development of flight and fur, will you find humans. Taking this walk is a great lesson in perspective, a cautionary tale about hubris and longevity that every human should read. --Therese Littleton