Plate Tectonics A Ladybird Expert Book

Ladybird Expert #4

by Iain Stewart

Part of the ALL-NEW Ladybird Expert series.

Discover in this accessible and authoritative introduction the fundamental theory of how our dynamic planet works.

Written by the celebrated geologist, academic and popular science presenter Iain Stewart, Plate Tectonics explores the Earth as a planetary machine and investigates the people and ideas that changed the way we look at the world.

You'll learn about the make up of the Earth in the past and the present, from monsoon-like currents in our planet's radioactive interior to magnetic force lines and what the planet would look like without water.

- Our planet as an active living system
- The planetary force field
- Fault lines that cross continents
- How plates tectonics protects life on Earth
- And much more . . .

Written by the leading lights and most outstanding communicators in their fields, the Ladybird Expert books provide clear, accessible and authoritative introductions to subjects drawn from science, history and culture.

For an adult readership, the Ladybird Expert series is produced in the same iconic small hardback format pioneered by the original Ladybirds. Each beautifully illustrated book features the first new illustrations produced in the original Ladybird style for nearly forty years.

56 pages, Hardcover

First published March 22, 2018

Reviews

[Brian Clegg · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a starting point in assessing this book it's essential to know the cultural background of Ladybird books in the UK. These were a series of cheap, highly illustrated, very thin hardbacks for children, ranging from storybooks to educational non-fiction. They had become very old-fashioned, until new owners Penguin brought back the format with a series of ironic humorous books for adults, inspired by the idea created by the artist Miriam Elia. Now, the 'Ladybird Expert' series are taking on serious non-fiction topics for an adult audience.

The good news is that, unlike the other entries in this series I've seen so far (Big Bang and Artificial Intelligence), Iain Stewart (not to be confused with mathematician Ian Stewart) has a topic in plate tectonics where the illustrations can sometimes put across some useful information, as opposed to being mere irritating decoration. This only applies to the theoretical topics - for the historical pages, which is more than half of the book, we're back to the sort of illustrations that make this a very embarrassing book for an adult to read in public.

Given the relatively small amount of space, far too much of it was given over to step-by-step historical development. A page would tell us about one person or set of people's small contribution to the development of the theory. Then we would get another page with a different person's contribution, without any sense of narrative flow: it felt very jerky to read. It didn't help the large number of individuals Stewart felt it necessary to introduce. It became a bit too much of an academic name check, rather than the story of the quite interesting battle to bring the concept of plate tectonics to the fore.

To give Stewart his due, he did manage to make he first few pages quite interesting (though not in the QI sense), but he was unable to overcome the reality that geology is the hardest of the sciences to make anything but dull to a popular audience. At times the progress from page to page as we were told about a gradual change in scientific understanding seemed (appropriately) glacial.

It's possible when focussing on, say, Wegener's story to produce something that has the potential to grip the reader. But overall, this Ladybird simply didn't work for me.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was looking for a book on plate tectonics to read while I was in Singapore, found this in the library catalogue, and was surprised to find it was a Ladybird book, which I had/read tonnes of as a kid (think "this is Dick, this is Jane" level). But this is a Ladybird Expert book, meant for adults, but still in the same small slim format with a picture on one page and text on the other (a few hundred words rather than the 10-20 you might find in a children's book). Sometimes the illustrations helped - e.g. a map showing how the continents fit together - but sometimes it was just a picture of a man in front of a ship, that sort of thing - there for visual interest but not particularly educational, unless you wanted to know what the people who came up with the various discoveries looked like.

As for the text, it pretty much followed a historical trajectory, tracing the theory of continental drift and then showing the discoveries that led to our knowledge about plate tectonics today. Which I think is fine, I like seeing how we know what we know, but I wonder if there's other more exciting ways of presenting the information, as most plate tectonics books I've browsed through follow a similar trajectory. Also, the thing that I'm most interested in wrt plate tectonics is how it promotes and sustains life, and this was literally one paragraph, the last one in the book.

In any case, I'm glad to have read this - I tried reading The Tectonic Plates are Moving! by Livermore and found it a bit over my head, switched to the VSI on Plate Tectonics by Molnar, but somehow stopped for reasons I don't recall. But I've finally finished this one. I should be able to go back to the VSI and maybe one day I'll be ready for Livermore's book.

[Tanwen Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is meant to be a fun and quirky primer about tectonics. its based on the old ladybird books and every spread had apage of text next to abeautiful diagram or illustarion. however, it uses a loyt of jargon that it fails to explain properly and focuses more on the historical context of the discovery than the science itself. the end result is something that geologists will get a nostalgic kick out of, but is not very understandable for novices.