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The World Without Us Alan Weisman 9780312347291 Books

Download As PDF : The World Without Us Alan Weisman 9780312347291 Books

The World Without Us Alan Weisman 9780312347291 Books

For a book that is supposed to discuss the future and what would happen to the world if humans were to suddenly disappear, you would think it would discuss what would happen in great detail. Instead, this book spends 80% of it's pages discussing history, pre-history, and how humans have ruined everything. The first two chapters hook you in by discribing how houses and cities will fall apart without humans to maintain them, but the next 4 chapters are about natural history and evolution of animals and plants throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas, most of which are extinct (which the author goes into verbose detail about how humans are responsible). After 100 pages I couldn't take it anymore, I wanted to learn about infrastructure and how nature will take back the world, but this book goes off on so many unrelated tangents that I gave up. I feel like I got jipped.


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The World Without Us Alan Weisman 9780312347291 Books Reviews

Quit different from the TV series. This book focuses mostly on the environmental consequences of our civilization if it were to vanish overnight.
The author uses examples of abandoned areas on earth now, such as the exclusion zone around Chernobyl and the DMZ on Cyprus to try and show what our planet used to look like before civilization came along.
He sites the work of researchers all over the world documenting the accumulation of waste and garbage that already clogs our oceans and beaches, such as the great Pacific gyre, and attempts to give an idea of how long it will take mother nature to clean up after us.
He also talks about the 400+ nuclear power plants and waste storage sites all over the world and gives an estimate of how long it would take to decay below lethal levels.
This is not light reading and the book assumes the reader has some basic scientific knowledge, but the style and prose are reader friendly.
Recommended for anyone with an environmental bent or those who just want to know what we might leave behind us.
I bought this book from the angle of a writer of post-apocalyptic stories. I wanted to understand exactly how the world would degrade (and how quickly) once humans were taken out of the picture. But most of this book is a history lesson.

I understand the need to look back in time in order to see where we might be in the future. But the time frames were so far-flung (and therefore so unrelatable) that I found much of this book so thoroughly boring that it was a real struggle to get through.

It's also obvious that the author did enormous amounts of research in putting this book together. Unfortunately, that left a lot of instances where the book went into painful detail about how this concept or that concept worked, and was just more writing for me to struggle through.

I really, really wanted to love this book. And while there are gems sprinkled throughout, I found the book as a whole to be utterly boring.
The reason you came for this book is probably to find out what will happen to your home or New York City after people disappear. You want to learn if it will really be like "I Am Legend" or other Post-Apocalyptic stories where people are gone. At least, that's why I came.
And Weisman does explain just that. But he does so in the first few chapters. The remain 15 or so go into details about Earth without man you never would have expected. He examines places like Cyprus and the Korean DMZ, which people haven't touched in ages. He takes you places you never would have expected. Each chapter is a different story, a different location, a different analysis. Each could be it's own article.
This book ends up teaching a lot about human history as well. I certainly didn't expect that.
This book is an interesting read, a learning adventure across the globe. As cheesy as it sounds, its a great ride.
Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is supposed to explore what would or could happen to our world if humans suddenly ceased to exist. Weisman does do this, but he must of necessity discuss how we have altered/destroyed much of our world, in order to illustrate what would happen if we were to disappear.

So, Weisman takes us on a tour from the mass extinction of the passenger pigeon in North American, to the Moa bird in New Zealand. We look at climate change, nuclear waste, and plastic islands in the oceans. It is a depressing catalog.

The only bright spot is that, to quote Jurassic Park, nature finds a way. Animals, plants and birds no longer found in Korea thrive in the depopulated DMZ. In the quarantine zone around Chernobyl, wolves have returned, along with moose, deer, badger, and horses.

The take away, the world will do fine without us. In fact, it might just thrive.
For a book that is supposed to discuss the future and what would happen to the world if humans were to suddenly disappear, you would think it would discuss what would happen in great detail. Instead, this book spends 80% of it's pages discussing history, pre-history, and how humans have ruined everything. The first two chapters hook you in by discribing how houses and cities will fall apart without humans to maintain them, but the next 4 chapters are about natural history and evolution of animals and plants throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas, most of which are extinct (which the author goes into verbose detail about how humans are responsible). After 100 pages I couldn't take it anymore, I wanted to learn about infrastructure and how nature will take back the world, but this book goes off on so many unrelated tangents that I gave up. I feel like I got jipped.