"Eating the Sun:
How Plants Power the Planet"
by Oliver Morton
Critical Praise for "Eating the Sun"
"A vast, elegant synthesis of biology, physics and environmental science that can inform our discussions of urgent issues."
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Meticulous but always engaging account?Morton faces a tough challenge in making the subject accessible, but he succeeds magnificently. The pace never flags in more than 400 pages recounting the history of life... Top-notch popular-science writing. "
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A beautiful example of what science writing can achieve."
- Library Journal (starred review)
"It is impossible to imagine a world without photosynthesis, and Oliver Morton's fascinating history gives us a new-found appreciation for this most important life process. Eating the Sun is sweeping in its scope, deeply satisfying in its detail and clarity. It is a thrilling story of intellectual adventure-highly readable, personal, and utterly consuming."
- Oliver Sacks, author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", "Seeing Voices: A Journey into the Land of the Deaf", and "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain"
"Everything you could possibly want from a popular science book."
- The Independent
"A book that may re-order the way you think about the world..."
- The Economist
"Highly original....Brilliant and beautifully written....Morton is...compelling and eloquent."
- The Sunday Telegraph
"I enjoyed this book as much for the crazed asides as for the upsetting insights."
- Sunday Times (London)
"A rare delight....Oliver Morton writes so engagingly that [Eating the Sun] reads as a well-crafted biography of the earth on behalf of the plant kingdom."
- Prospect Magazine
"A fascinating and important book"
- Ian McEwan, author of "Atonement", "Saturday", and "On Chesil Beach"
Summary
A story of a world in crisis and the importance of plants, the history of the earth, and the feuds and fantasies of warring scientists-this is not your fourth-grade science class's take on photosynthesis.
From acclaimed science journalist Oliver Morton comes this fascinating, lively, profound look at photosynthesis, nature's greatest miracle. Wherever there is greenery, photosynthesis isworking to make oxygen, release energy, and create living matter from the raw material of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Without photosynthesis, there would be an empty world, an empty sky, and a sun that does nothing more than warm the rocks and reflect off the sea. With photosynthesis, we have a living world with three billion years of sunlight-fed history to relish.
Eating the Sun is a bottom-up account of our planet, a celebration of how the smallest things, enzymes and pigments, influence the largest things-the oceans, the rainforests, and the fossil fuel economy. From the physics, chemistry, and cellular biology that make photosynthesis possible, to the quirky and competitive scientists who first discovered the beautifully honed mechanisms of photosynthesis, to the modern energy crisis we face today, Oliver Morton offers a complete biography of the earth through the lens of this mundane and most important of processes.
More than this, Eating the Sun is a call to arms. Only by understanding photosynthesis and the flows of energy it causes can we hope to understand the depth and subtlety of the current crisis in the planet's climate. What's more, nature's greatest energy technology may yet inspire the breakthroughs we need to flourish without such climatic chaos in the century to come.
Entertaining, thought-provoking, and deeply illuminating, Eating the Sun reveals that photosynthesis is not only the key to humanity's history; it is also vital to confronting and understanding contemporary realities like climate change and the global food shortage. This book will give you a new and perhaps troubling way of seeing the world, but it also explains how we can change our situation-for the better or the worse.
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