Older Than Dirt: A Wild but True History of Earth by Don Brown (review)

Who knows Earth better, or at least has a more immediate interest in it, than a groundhog and worm, who spend their days digging in the soil? Groundhog begins to directly regale readers with Earth's history but only gets as far as the Big Bang before he's interrupted by the worm, whose silly remarks and questions force him to redirect the lesson to his new sidekick, placing readers into the role of eavesdropping audience. Ninety-one comic book–style pages of narration later, human readers will have a reasonable outline of immensely complex geological processes, and a good sense of the s-l-o-w rhythms of geological time. However, the entire history of Earth—multiple appearances and extinctions of species, plate tectonics, periods of freezing and warming, bombardment by astral object, etc., etc.—is a lot to manage and spins the narrative on to daunting length, particularly when a worm's interruptions send his tutor into side issues that ramp up the complexity even further. Although Brown has skillfully demonstrated in earlier works (Great American Dust Bowl, BCCB 10/13, and Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina & New Orleans, BCCB 10/15) how well sequential art can convey passage of events over time, the illustrations here are more a series of infographics with narration boxes and speech bubbles. The main text concludes with charts, maps, source notes, and a bibliography, but it is then followed by an awkwardly placed coda, "Is Climate Change a Real Thing?," and direction to a scanty website. Readers mature enough to follow this lesson all the way through won't require kibitzing critters for entertainment, but they may nonetheless appreciate this non-textbook attempt at deep-time science.