Reading the Rocks

The Autobiography of the Earth

By: Marcia Bjornerud

Narrated by: Alma Cuervo

From the author of Turning to Stone, a mediation on the stories that rock can tell us about the deep history of our planet

To many of us, the Earth’s crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, the Earth’s crust, and every stone within it, is a richly illustrated narrative, telling gothic tales of cataclysm and reincarnation. How can we decode these stories?

In Reading the Rocks, geologist Marcia Bjornerud shows us. Taking the reader on an eye-opening tour of Deep Time, Bjornerud explains in elegant prose what we see and feel beneath our feet. Both scientist and storyteller, she reminds us that our home is a living thing with lessons to teach. She shows how our planet has long maintained a delicate balance between creation and destruction, and how the global give-and-take has sustained life on Earth through eons of upheaval.

Today, however, with the rapidly escalating effects of human beings on the planet, that great balance is being threatened—and the consequences may be catastrophic. Reading the Rocks reveals how heeding the messages in rocks can help us correct our course.

Critic reviews

"We certainly need popular science books like Reading the Rocks to help science fight back... Bjornerud has a rare talent for explaining scientific ideas clearly with intriguing and helpful analogies, similes, and metaphors."
—Nature Magazine

"No one escapes the evidence of our Earth's history: arcane, violent, and relevant to all daily concerns. The language of the planet, superbly translated by Bjornerud, illuminates our common past and uncertain future. The four-billion-year-long animated conversation between rocks, water, and life continues." —Lynn Margulis, author of Symbiotic Planet

"The perfect field guide for a geologic field trip through the Earth's history."
—Jill S. Schneiderman, editor of Liberation Science

"A truly exciting book."
—Robert H. Dott, Jr., co-author of Evolution of the Earth

"Marcia Bjornerud knows her rocks, in all their interconnected glory to the entire biosphere, and she tells their stories with depth, clarity, and passion."—Tyler Volk, author of Quarks to Culture

The author deep understanding of geologic processes

To brief. I would loved to have love more detail on plate motion and crustal recycling.

Well crafted and approachable

This book crafted an approachable narrative context to the science of the earth, with good mixture of history, etymology, and descriptive language. Absolutely loved it.

The storytelling and insightful writing!

Great supplementation for scientific literature, thank you Marcia and I hope to read more of your work

All over the place

While I agree with most topics discussed in this book and was generally interested in much of the subject matter, it strays wildly from the premise. By about halfway through, it hardly seems like the same book. With the exception of a few callbacks to the title premise, by the end of this book it ends up being hardly about rocks at all. It also ends up being way too technical for audio. It would potentially be a better read than listen.

More like a whiny sermon.

What starts out as a good geology book, slowly turns into a rant espousing all of the standard cultish points of environmentalist progressivism. Unless you want to be berated for how terrible humanity is, or perhaps you enjoy being complained at, you should pass.