text: Richard Fortney's "Earth" is a survey, in mostly layman's terms, of the geological history of the Earth and how it relates to humankind.  Fortney tells the story by means of a journey around the earth, selecting a series of locations where the earth's geology is apparent, and usually the meaning of that geology was debated by scholars to a greater understanding.  
  
  Fortney starts at Mount Vesuvius in Italy, preceeds to the Hawaiian Islands, hence to the Swiss Alps and to other locations aroudn the world.  Fortney relates the geology of each chosen location to plate tectonics as a means to explain how each terrain come to be the way it is.  This leads into extended and sometimes fascinating discussions of the former alignements of the continents in prior ages such as the "supercontinent" of Gondwana.  For each location, Fortney also relates the effects of the terrain on the history of the humans who have lived in that location.  Along the way, Fortney drives home the sheer vastness of the timescale of earth and its geological processes.  The dedicated reader will view his landscape with a new perspective.
  
  Fortney is a gifted writer with a good eye for the illustrative anecdote.  Large portions of this book will be fascinating to the reader with at least some schooling in the sciences.  It turns out, for example, that the complicated geology of Newfoundland results from its origin as pieces of three different tectonic plates (North America, ocean bottom, and Northern Europe).  The descriptions of Northwest Scotland as the remains of truly ancient mountains are put into appropriate scale in part by Fortney's historical anecdotes and by his experiences of rockhounding in the often cold rainy weather of the Scottish Highlands.
  
  The narrative runs a little long at over 400 pages, and Fortney's explanations will sometimes outrun the scientific background of the average reader.  Nevertheless, this book is highly recommended to the reader with at least a casual interest in geology and its links to human history
  