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Editorial
Reviews From Amazon
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.
If a virulent virus—or even the Rapture—depopulated Earth overnight,
how long before all trace of humankind vanished? That's the provocative,
and occasionally puckish, question posed by Weisman (An Echo in My Blood)
in this imaginative hybrid of solid science reporting and morbid speculation.
Days after our disappearance, pumps keeping Manhattan's subways dry would
fail, tunnels would flood, soil under streets would sluice away and the
foundations of towering skyscrapers built to last for centuries would start
to crumble. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, anything made
of bronze might survive in recognizable form for millions of years—along
with one billion pounds of degraded but almost indestructible plastics
manufactured since the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, land freed from mankind's
environmentally poisonous footprint would quickly reconstitute itself,
as in Chernobyl, where animal life has returned after 1986's deadly radiation
leak, and in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a refuge
since 1953 for the almost-extinct goral mountain goat and Amur leopard.
From a patch of primeval forest in Poland to monumental underground villages
in Turkey, Weisman's enthralling tour of the world of tomorrow explores
what little will remain of ancient times while anticipating, often poetically,
what a planet without us would be like. (July) |
From The New Yorker
Teasing out the consequences of a simple thought experiment—what would
happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished—Weisman has written
a sort of pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted
house. Among the highlights: with pumps not working, the New York City
subways would fill with water within days, while weeds and then trees would
retake the buckled streets and wild predators would ravage the domesticated
dogs. |
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Texas’s unattended petrochemical complexes might ignite, scattering
hydrogen cyanide to the winds—a "mini chemical nuclear winter." After thousands
of years, the Chunnel, rubber tires, and more than a billion tons of plastic
might remain, but eventually a polymer-eating microbe could evolve, and,
with the spectacular return of fish and bird populations, the earth might
revert to Eden. |
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