Whoever imagined that geology was a lifeless subject?

Rocks are still and lifeless things, and geologists are men with beards whose emotional bandwidth is taken up with an unnatural attachment to cherts and clasts and the chill beauty of the subducted lithosphere. Such is the stereotype. The academic geologist and New Yorker contributor Marcia Bjornerud has managed to go a fair distance towards dispelling it. In her previous book, Timefulness, she wrote for the general reader and with persuasive lyricism about readjusting our focus to thinking in geological time. 

Now, in Turning to Stone, she looks back over a lifetime of teaching geology in the American Midwest and fieldwork across the globe to argue for a more integrated understanding of the Earth’s long history. The book is at times intimate and confessional, but the overarching idea is vast and arresting. Bjornerund makes the case for challenging the barrier between the organic and inorganic, for seeing the slow but ever-shifting rocks of Earth’s crust as part of the planet’s ecology, just as much as plants and beasts.