I should say up front. This book didn’t quite do what it said on the tin.I was expecting Lynn Sykes’s Plate Tectonics and Great Earthquakes to be an accessible reference book. Sykes is an authority on the subject of plate tectonics and as both an undergraduate and a postgraduate student I’d read extensively around his subject, including some of the original papers he references.
The book was principally about Sykes and his works, in what seems to be a new fashion for biographies of eminent scientists. Inevitably, therefore, though it referenced other scientific developments, it wasn’t the overarching work that I envisaged.
It began began promisingly enough, with an outline of how the discipline of plate tectonics evolved, but I did find it bafflingly diffuse, with a lot of detail on some areas of seismology and very little on others, reflecting the aspects on which Sykes worked. In particular, I enjoyed the section about earthquake prediction; but then there were four chapters on earthquakes and nuclear power, much of which was really about engineering and hazard management.
This was interesting enough in its own way, though probably more so for an engineer rather than an Earth scientist, but it really wasn’t what I was looking for in the book. And then there were the anecdotes about his field trips, or his relationships with his colleagues, which came from nowhere and led nowhere, many of which left me scratching my head about precisely why they were in the book (such as, for example, the sentence about one colleague standing while everyone else remained seated).
It felt a little self-indulgent, as though the author couldn’t quite make his mind up whether it was a reference book or a memoir. I wasn’t sure, either. I enjoyed it, though I think a reader without a reasonable grasp of the subject would have struggled with a lot of the scientific terminology.
Thanks to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.
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