This slim volume of little more than 100 pages addresses the big questions of life on Earth. Not, ‘Shall we go to the pub?’ but ‘Why are there so many species and why are there more in some places than others?’.
The author is a proper biologist and he writes this book to explain how the game of life works on this planet to the one species who reads books. There are attractive illustrations and helpful graphs and tables, a very good glossary and a list of references for future reading so the real length of the text which does the heaviest lifting in explaining what’s what is around 50 pages. This is a miracle of distillation and means that the reading is quite intense. You may find, as I did, that your brain aches after reading a single chapter and you need to put the book down and come back to it later. I always did come back to it as I wanted more and to get to the end and I think many will be drawn along by the clear prose and the well-chosen examples which illustrate many of the concepts.
This is a really good book and I thank the author for writing it so clearly.
It would be a bit of a stretch to say that everyone should read this book but that idea made me wonder what politicians do read (apart from messages on WhatsApp). A book about all species on the whole of our planet over billions of years can surely be seen as mind-expanding and this book is designed to give you more of a grasp of how life got to where it is now. That’s surely worth a read?
The cover? Highly appropriate, pretty, uncluttered. I’d give the cover 8/10.
The Game of Species: an introduction to biodiversity by Julian Simon Lopez-Villalta is published by Pelagic
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