She Treads Softly: Islands in Deep Time

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Islands in Deep Time

Islands in Deep Time: Ancient Landscapes Lost and Found by Markes E. Johnson
10/31/23; 312 pages
Columbia University Press

Islands in Deep Time: Ancient Landscapes Lost and Found by Markes E. Johnson is a highly recommended guided geological journey through deep time to find the traces of ancient islands. The greater appeal of this scholarly work targets professional and academic readers working in the field or related fields. Armchair enthusiasts will appreciate the journey too, especially if you are interested in ancient islands and their discrete ecologies and well preserved fossil plants and animals.

This is a journey through deep time across the geography of today's world in relationship to the origin of paleoislands. Each chapter includes a topographic map and a global map showing the location. These maps trace the changing positions of continents and oceans beginning five hundred million years ago to the present. There are many photos throughout.

Chapters focus on: New Hampshire's Mount Monadnock, Wisconsin's Baraboo Archipelago, Hudson Bay's Jens Munk Archipelago,Inner Mongolia's Bater Island, Western Australia's Mowanbini Archipelago, Western Australia's Labyrinth Karst, Wales St. David's Archipelago,Baja California's Erendira Islands, Maderia Archipelago, Azorean Santa Maria Island, Islands on the African and Pacific Tectonic Plates, and descending Mount Misen on Japan's Miyajima.

Johnson helpfully includes a Glossary for those of us who are a bit rusty on our terms. This is followed by the Notes, Bibliography, and index. This book is a travelogue that takes readers through time showing how ancient island seascapes can be viewed today from the rock record.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of the Columbia University Press via Edelweiss.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.