The World Without Us

The World Without Us

2007 • 336 pages

Ratings36

Average rating3.6

15

This book was not what I thought it was going to be, and I was mightily disappointed.

What did I think it would be? Well, I thought it would look at what would become of the planet Earth if tomorrow the human species simply vanished; basically, what it says on the tin. What the book spends an extraordinary amount of time actually discussing is what existed before humans evolved and what horrible things we have done since then. I fail to see what the Mau Mau Uprising or what killed off the woolly mammoths have to do with this book, and yet there they are, gobbling up space and too much of my time.

I made it a handful of pages past 100, and in that space there were about two chapters in the book that actually talked about what would happen to human-made and natural spaces once humans were gone. That's it, just two! They were fantastic chapters, very informative and easy to read, but the off-topic junk is taking up too much space and I find myself actually angry at the prospect of reading this book.