Reviews and Resources:Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

Abstract

This short book, less than 200 pages of text, is a delight. It's not clear for whom it is written. Falkowsky says it's an outreach beyond that of a textbook. I doubt if most of its contents aren't familiar in broad outline to most professional microbiologists, but I'm sure all of them would be rewarded by reading it. I was. It's sprinkled with intriguing historical vignettes: when he was 22, Darwin collected fossils with Adam Sedgwick in north Wales; Darwin took a copy of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology along with the King James Bible on the HMS Beagle; Robert Hooke learned Dutch to read Van Leeuwenhoek, and wonderful sentences like, “In 1859, the same year that Big Ben chimed for the first time and the London publisher John Murray and Sons sent the first edition of The Origin of Species to press, on the other side of the Atlantic an American train conductor, Edwin Drake, drilled the first major oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania.”