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Title: Endless and boring
Review: I was enthusiastic about the book at first. The catchy title, the attractive front cover, and particularly the addition of drawings of ammonites at the beginning of each chapter appealed to me. It turned out to be a great disappointment. Half-way through the book, as I was reading about Smith's financial difficulties, I have to admit that I thought,"Who cares?". The reason is not that William Smith or his life or his research are uninteresting, quite the contrary; it is the author's style that is stuffy. He writes in a way that makes it sound as if the whole subject bored him out of his mind, that he couldn't wait to be done with it, and threw in a lot of fancy words to make up for his own lack of enthusiasm.I love geology, and I wish that William Smith and the seminal research he did were shown in a better light. This book doesn't do justice to either of them.
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