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Title: More stuff, less fluff please.
Review: Fortey is surprisingly adept at constructing an elegant English sentence. And he makes this clear to the reader over and over and over again. During the entire page that Fortey spent musing about the early death of the "English Mozart" George Frederick Pinto, finally to compare it to the early extinction of some Cambrian animal, I found myself thinking how much I'd rather be shown a drawing of a Cambrian animal, or perhaps read a brief definition of "mitochondria" or "brachiopod". I don't think I'd exaggerate to say half the book is spent in elegant digressions into his career, pop culture, the arts, and myriad other tangential topics, while the other half suffers from a deficit of detail. Perhaps he thought these would engage the reader, but I, for one, am a reader who found the title engaging and would like to read a good deal more about it than this book offers.
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