Michael Alford Andrews

The fascinating story of the rise of a continent to a dominant position in the world, told apparently from a geologist's or metallurgist's view-point. A large format, generously illustrated and produced book based on the BBC serial, it presents a massive amount of information on a wide range of topics, starting with the drifting continents and the tectonic movements that threw up the continents and their minerals, and ending with an account of the World Wars and the modern energy and environmental crises. I personally found it heavy going, though, probably because of the very dense prose, replete with unfamiliar place-names and obscure architectural terms, and the sheer weight of information contained in its close on its 300 large size pages of compact type. Also, the thread of the thesis that the geological past has in large measure determined the geo-politics of the world, loses its impact when there are clearly so many alternative ways that the nations and people of the world could have conducted themselves.… (altro)

The Life That Lives on Man is an entertaining and informative little book.

It is rather old (1976) and biology is a fast-moving field. However, at the level of detail given, there is probably little that would now be considered wrong, though if Andrews were writing this book today, advances in genome sequencing would enable him to indicate even more diversity among micro-organisms than he then could. That would fit well with his theme that our skin should be considered as an eco-system in which the various organisms co-operate and compete with each other and with us.

The book contains introductory chapters, followed by chapters about micro-organisms (bacteria, viruses, fungi), mites and ticks, fleas (followed by an extra chapter on plague), lice, and bedbugs (though bedbugs are of course merely frequent visitors, not residents of our surface). The final chapter, Learning to live with our ecology, puts the subject into useful perspective.… (altro)