Author: Dorrik Stow
Publisher: Oxford University Press 2010
Price: £16.99 Hardback
Isbn: 9780199214280

The premise of this book has some merit: take a significant geographical feature from the Earth’s distant past, describe its development, and use this as a peg on which to hang a discourse on how the Earth is shaped, and how geologists are able to trace the outline of continents and seas in past eras. The feature in question is the Tethys Ocean, which once stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Northern India, and which was closed up by continental movement about 5.5 million years ago. However, for this aim to work, the book needs to be readable, and this one hovers between skimmable and skippable. The text swings from faux-jocularity (with obligatory exclamation marks!) to polysyllabic-technical. 

The second problem is the author’s relentless focus on himself. I think Nigel Molesworth says somewhere, “What’s the point of writing if you can't make yourself the hero?” The book is stuffed with reminiscences of every field excursion the author ever took, with the occasional walk-on part for buddies and former students. The author seems to have an aversion to giving credit to anyone outside his own circle who worked on Tethys. You’d think there would be some mention of who gave the Tethys Ocean its name, but no. Poor old Eduard Suess is left out of the story altogether. It reads like conference coffee break smalltalk. The reader does not care whether the author enjoys mint tea or coffee in Marrakesh. A good (and ruthless) editor could have cut the book to a third of its length by removing these anecdotes and other unneeded digressions. A good editor might also have pointed out that using your own poetry for chapter epigrams is inadvisable. 

I’m suspicious that the book is written with one eye on a possible TV documentary script. All those field excursion stories could be turned into scenes where the author stands in front of imposing geological sections in exotic locales, and intones solemnly about conodonts and fusulinids. But a word of caution – with TV in the state it is, even if such a project did get the green light, there’s a strong chance the narrator’s role would be given to some unqualified celebrity, while the fuming author was relegated to five minutes of talking head duty… 

Specifics: the production values are good, as you would expect from OUP, though I would prefer better-looking maps. Index is present if perfunctory. Gaffes: an ocean encircled by a C-shaped continent is round, not C-shaped, and the island of St Helena is not on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge