(This was posted last year when the hardcover was originally posted. Little Bytes still highly recommends!!!)
Sometimes I think that the more I research New York, the harder it gets to give a tour of the city. How do you cover it all in four days, let alone four hours? How do you do justice to the history of Madison Square while speeding by it on a bus?
This is one of the reasons why I so admire admire Christopher Potter's first book, You Are Here, wherein he presents the history of the entire universe in only 271 pages.
Many have raved about Potter's lucid, enjoyable and conversational tone. I agree with their praise, although by conversational, we're not talking about a chat you have with a stupid person on an airplane. This is more like the kind of conversation you have at a dinner party where you push your wine glass just out of reach because you realize you're going to need all of your remaining faculties to follow each thread of your neighbor's narrative.
The dinner party analogy isn't too far off. You Are Here is filled with fun anecdotal trivia (from Dolly Parton's uniqueness in scientific history to a $125 million mistake resulting from a confusion between miles and kilometers) and has the feel of a dinner companion, who has read all of the most recent scientific journals, bringing you up to speed on what's happening in the increasingly removed world of the modern laboratory.
What I love most about the book, however, is that Potter employs an ingenious structure, which leads the reader on a series of well-ordered sightseeing excursions. He first takes us on an ever expanding tour that begins with the tallest human known to exist (in the 1 meter-10 meter range) and ends 13 billion light-years away. Later, he takes us on a reverse tour, a tour of diminishment, that starts with the smallest human and ends with quarks and electrons deep inside the atom.
Other chapters are histories of scientific inquiry that resulted in our removal of ourselves from the center of the universe, and explanations of relativity and quantum mechanics. Then he takes us on a tour of the birth of stars and our galaxies and our planet and moon before giving a time line of life on earth (as bacteria 4 billion years ago) that eventually brings us to our bipedal ancestors in the Pliocene epoch (between 5 and 3 million years ago) and finally to our own Holocene epoch when our ancestors begin to farm for the first time. He concludes with what we know today about human development and global migration.
And that concludes his tour. Feel free to visit the gift shop.
An amazing accomplishment!
See the review of You Are Here in The Guardian.
Read the article about the author and book by Stuart Jeffries.
Hear an interview with the author on the Leonard Lopate Show.
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