About book Frozen Earth: The Once And Future Story Of Ice Ages (2004)
Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages, is a great book about the Ice age and the gradual acknowledgement made by scientific society of the existence of ice ages. Doug Macdougall, the author of Frozen Earth, mentions different scientific and non-scientific figures who have contributed in making the theory of Ice age. He writes about how they comprehended the causes of ice age and the evidence current landscape provides. He talks about Louis Agassiz frequently because of this contribution of putting forward the Theory of Ice Age for the first time. His main objective for this book was to tell stories about glaciation of Earth and how mankind came to recognize it and the importance of glaciation in shaping Earth.Macdougall gives reasons and his own critiques on many scientific discoveries he mentions in the book. This makes it more than a story and more like a narrative with comments. He illustrates in this book that any conclusions made on Ice Age was dependent on deep observations made by many naturalists, philosophers even and scientists. Some of these observations at times tend to be scientific. However, he explains all of them well enough that any person with little scientific background can understand it. As the book progresses, the contents gets more and more scientific which can be frustrating at times. But it does not happen too often that one would want to keep the book down. Also, for the first half of the book, in each chapter he mentions one important historical figure who contributed in understanding glaciation on Earth in the past. He writes their life history and as one moves from one figure to another, it sometimes does feel like he is deviating from the subject matter. Overall, Frozen Earth is an informative book. To anyone, who is interested in Ice Age or was fascinated with Ice Age movies and wanted to learn more about Ice Age, this is a worthy book to read. Moreover, this book can also be used in certain courses which focus on Earth’s landscape.
I won't rehash what other reviewers have written about this excellent book except to say that I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Frozen Earth is organized as a series of biographical chapters focusing on different scientists who advanced our understanding of the history of Earth's glaciations stretching back several billion years. These biographical sketches include Louis Agassiz, James Croll, Milutin Milankovitch and others. I found this fascinating and it whet my appetite for more substantial biographies of these remarkable individuals. Unfortunately, in some cases further scholarship does not exist.
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