2024 the best and most beautiful things in the world review

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(as of Dec 24, 2024 20:41:07 UTC - Details)

The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way.
 
Her work is both timeless and timely, and spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present.  These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands.
 
Alongside the photographs, Sussman relays fascinating – and sometimes harrowing – tales of her global adventures tracking down her subjects and shares insights from the scientists who research them. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; First Edition (April 14, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 022605750X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226057507
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.65 pounds
Reviewer: Dr. June M. Reinisch
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: This is an amazing book! With pictures and short fascinating essays this ...
Review: This is an amazing book! With pictures and short fascinating essays this book tells about the oldest living organisms on the earth. If you thought, as I did, that the redwoods were the oldest (and biggest), boy were we wrong! There are far older and far bigger things on our planet and Rachel Sussman has gone in search of them. Best gift ever for your smartest friends, colleagues, curious children, yourself, and anyone who loves nature and our planet. It starts with a map of the world indicating where each plant can be found. Since they are sprinkled on all the continents, this is a great book for travellers who love to have destinations planned for their adventures and for armchair travellers too. There follows a wonderful photograph and essay on each of the oldest living things. A really beautiful unique book at a surprisingly reasonable price.

Reviewer: David
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A path that should be traveled more often- art, science, and (in my mind) conservation
Review: I haven't yet thoroughly gotten into this book, but after a quick half hour with it I'm satisfied and impressed. While it would be understandable for Rachel sussman to consider this a finished project I was happy to see that it may well continue, and would look forward to any more material released from this project. I love the images, some may not find them impressive but having an art degree and having done a fair bit of photography myself I'm impressed with her ability to capture these images well. With the possible exception of the lichens i would not say that these are "pictures of (trees) (bushes) (mushrooms)". They are more then that. I secretly wish that everyone has a copy of this book, not that everyone would probably enjoy it as I do. It is humbling to see images of things that have lived so long on this planet, and frightening to think about how humans are changing that. I can only imagine that it must have been difficult for her to cross out the age of some of the oldest things on this world, that she has stood in front of, and write deceased. I will share this book with many people

Reviewer: wiredweird
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Mind-boggling
Review: A tree 2000 years old, another a 13,000, and a clonal copse of trees 70,000 years old - or maybe a few hundred thousand. Bacteria somewhere around a half-million years old. Yet odder beings in the thousands to ten-thousand-plus range. If the individual organism isn't at least 2000 years old, it doesn't make the cut.This book is simply awe-inspiring - to be among beings that live such lives, where ice ages might come and go around the one individual. That time scale simply boggles the mind. Then the chill sets in: a few of these beings have died since their pictures were taken. A tree of 3000 years succumbed to fire, another of 13,000 was killed in a construction project. What lived so long can die in minutes, and you can't just plant some seeds and grow a new one, not 13,000 years old. Gone, after all that time, because of natural hazards or human carelessness.And, in the current Great Extinction, we'll lose a lot more, mostly never having known they ever lived. Environmental threats and climate change can move faster than these living things can respond. I find it humbling, too - so few human artifacts or cultures have the power to last as long as these beings have.Although the naturalist who collected these images took care with proper identification, she's not a scientist by trade. She's an artist, a photographer. But she's a part of the scientific venture, too, making it humanly understandable, even personal, and stirring the sense of awe and respect that underlies nearly all scientific research. (I first became aware of this book through a review in Science magazine.) Really, she just proves that the dichotomy of science and art is artificial and arbitrary, more an artifact of the viewer's preconceptions than of the fields themselves. This has my highest recommendation.-- wiredweird

Reviewer: Adalind
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great seller
Review: Book came as described.

Reviewer: Carolyn
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Best gift ever!
Review: I gave this to my dad for his 70th birthday as he and my mom were about to take a road trip. My mom reported that he was totally fascinated by the book, as she received excitedly stated random facts for the next week. This is a very interesting book (I paged through it before giving it as a gift), and is perfect for people who enjoy great pictures, science buffs, history buffs, and anyone who likes to look at things from a different angle. You can pick it up and open to a page at random and learn about a single organism, or you can approach it with a more comprehensive outlook. Each section is well thought out and well written, and the book overall is organized well.

Reviewer: x
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: executed pretty well. Only drawbacks
Review: A very interesting concept, executed pretty well. Only drawbacks, imo, are that the photographs aren't as good as in many other nature-related books, and the narration has too many bad jokes / wordplay and unnecessary references to the author's romantic problems. But those are just what kept my rating from being 5 stars. The photographs are good enough, particularly given the book's reasonable cost, and the essays are very informative.

Reviewer: TXgungirl
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: BEAUTIFUL!!! WE WILL ALWAYS HAVE THESE THINGS THANKS TO THIS BOOK!
Review: Wow. What a great book of photography! It's really amazingly beautiful to look at! It contains lots of pix of various trees and plants but there being a tree on the cover I figured that would be the case. I mean really, the OLDEST living things on EARTH! Call me strange but I think it's a fantastic study and WELL worth preserving in film because you never know when we'll no longer have these things around, you know? The photographs are beautifully done. Rachel Sussman is one of those rare gifted artists who give photography a good name and that makes me want to learn it myself! She's able to see certain shapes, pick them out and make you see what she sees. SIMPLY AMAZING!

Reviewer: King David
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Nice, high quality book w/ good pics and great stories!
Review: The book is high quality. Many of the photos are top notch others are "ok". I really enjoy the stories of the adventure of getting to the locations, seeing the subject and a bit of the background around it.

Reviewer: ana_cph
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: This is a wonderful book - from beautiful illustrations to inspiring writings to most exquisite attention to detail, it provides us with an intimate encounter between biology and magic.

Reviewer: Ramira Mellis
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Very interesting. A must read for people who value nature.

Reviewer: Nicholas D Brown
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A beautifully crafted book. Just buy it.

Reviewer: Himanshu Bhatnagar
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A good book to gain knowledge about some of the most precious, oldest living organisms on the planet. The age of some of them is staggering! The pictures, though, could have been better and at times seem almost amateurish. The narrative is patchy, ranging from some lovely pieces that transport you to places you never visited to others that are pedestrian and almost racist.

Reviewer: Prospero
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: In a few words: The best story on TED and the most impressive book documentary I've seen. It gave me the same feeling I get when on a summer night I'm in the field, watching the Milky Way in the stars - small, silent and thankful I'm allowed to be part of this universe and this world. Mrs Rachel Sussman: Thank you for sharing these wonderful encounters with the rest of us.