Rating: 
Summary: EXTREMELY BORING!
Review: This book is the most boring book I have ever read. I have to read it for my biology class and write in a journal summarizing it. It's terrible! I always wander off in my mind while reading it and can hardly finish a page because it is so far from interesting. I do not recommend reading this book unless you really want to know all the boring facts about science. If I had to rename this book I would call it "All The Boring Facts That You Never Wanted To Know About Science". Sorry but it's true, it just doesn't appeal to anyone other than scientists or science teachers :)
Rating: 
Summary: A 65-million-year-old Murder Mystery
Review: This is the story of the discovery of why the dinosaurs -- and so many other creatures -- went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago. Walter Alvarez was a young geologist who discovered an "iridium anomaly" in a deposit at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary that strongly suggested that an extraterrestrial event of massive effect had happened then. He was joined by his father, Luis Alvarez, a physicist at Berkeley, in the pursuit of the significance of this finding. It seems hard to believe, but most geologists were reluctant to posit anything like a meteor strike as being a significant factor in Earth's history, preferring to explain everything by invoking gradual processes.Yet it became clear early on that something big had happened, and various candidates were mooted, such as a nearby supernova, or a companion star to the sun periodically throwing comet orbits out of whack. This book is the story of how geologists, chemists, physicists and others over more than a decade closed in on the solution -- a massive impact in the Yucatan Penninsula whose after-effects shrouded the Earth in darkness for many months -- starting with that original discovery back in 1977. This is a reasonably lightweight account, but with enough details to give the reader a good idea of the technical problems without descending into jargon. When you are done you don't really know much more geology than when you started, but you might wish you had become a geologist, because the field trips sure seem like a lot of fun.
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