Coral

"This is a wonderful book. Steve Jones obviously had great fun writing it. It’s full of a great mass of not always relevant, but always fascinating, elements, an incredibly eclectic collection of things to do with coral and man’s relation with coral. It’s just an amazing sweep: he takes you from Darwin and Captain Cook through to the nuclear blast in Bikini Atoll, through to global warming, and what that means. He shows how the coral, over the eons, has served an amazing service to the planet, and indirectly to us, by absorbing vast amounts of carbon. But, as we burn off the carbon, it warms the oceans, and that threatens the coral. He has a wonderful line about how coral reefs tell the tale of how life began, and also record many of its catastrophes. Like ice cores, there’s a lot of climate history to be learned from the coral. Coral is an incredibly precious resource, and when it’s allowed to thrive it’s amazingly life-affirming. For example, it’ll form around a wreck – you think of a wreck as a terrible loss but, actually, for the marine wildlife, it’s a fantastic asset, and the coral thrives on it – as well as in all sorts of other places, like the legs of oil platforms. The book combines some fantastic imagery, very very clear science, an incredible range of different stories, and this warmth: it’s a wonderfully personal narrative. For a science book – for any book – it’s a fantastic read."