spaziolibero

[This review is both for Il mondo sottosopra , by Massimo Polidoro, and for Republic of Lies , by Anna Merlan. Alas, Polidoro's book is not available in English, and Merlan's is not available in Italian.] In this times of COVID negationism, I'm more and more convinced that the spread of conspiracist thought is one of the main, if not the main problem advanced societies have to solve if they want to continue to function. I don't know if it's a solvable problem, almost certainly not in the short term, but I welcome any and all sources that can, at the very least, help define and describe where conspiracy theories come from, why they are so attractive and what can be done to limit their dissemination. Both these books do all these things (and much more): Polidoro tackles the argument more from a psychological and historical perspective, while Merlan's point of view is more journalistic and more focused on the American current situation; and both a...

This book is not one tale, but three intertwined ones. The main, and the grandest one, as the title suggests, is that of the rise and fall of the dinosaurs: how they came to be, how they utterly dominated life on Earth for more than one hundred million years (to put things in perspective, we Homo sapiens have been on this planet for a mere three hundred thousand), and how they suddenly and almost entirely disappeared, leaving behind their fossilized bones, nests and footprints (oh, and also what we now call "birds"). The second tale is that of paleontology, its history, its blunders, its successes, and of the state-of-the-art of its research and discoveries. The third tale is that of Prof. Brusatte himself, of how with some luck, some talent, and a lot of hard work, he turned his childhood dream into a career, and of some of the remarkable individuals he learned from, worked with or teached to. The net result is a gripping read: the narrative of the impact of t...