Reviews for The Web of life

The average rating for The Web of life based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-01 00:00:00 Anna Bithiah Vaernes This is probably the only non-political book where I wanted to punch the author in the face after reading it. Possibly the most irritating book I have read since The Dark Tower. the book is fine for about 600 pages, then Frank loses it completely. First off, if after 600 pages you don't care whether a single character lives or dies, you know your in trouble. Secondly, if you are going to make the argument that everyone is just a mass of DNA and everything we do is the sole outcome of that DNA, why is every single American in this book practically evil? I don't have a problem with the portrayal as such, just that it doesn't jive with what he is putting forth about humanity. And Lastly, if the Yrr are so much better than humanity, so much more in tune with nature and basically benevolent, why are they using whales as projectiles? All of their offensives essentially involve that mass destruction of living creatures both human and non. That kind of hurts the case of them being benevolent avatars of mother nature or whatever he is trying to suggest. The chapter about the trip a particle takes through the oceans right in the middle of the books Climax was particularly galling. This may be the first any only time I invested this much time in a book to basically skim the ending. It is big and long so it would undoubtedly make excellent kindling.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-10-28 00:00:00 Ilkka Nivala Borring.... Yawn. Meeting the Queen of yrr couldn't have been any less exciting. Maybe the original would've been better. Maybe a reread? Q: He was one of many, too many. What he'd experienced in the early hours of that morning had been going on elsewhere all over the world. The parallels were striking - once you knew what had happened, and only Ucañan did. Maybe the fisherman, with his simple way of seeing things, had even sensed the more complex connections, but in the absence of his evidence, the mystery went unsolved (c) Q: At sea the world was just water and sky, with little to tell them apart. There were no visual markers, which meant that on clear days, the sense of infinity could suck you into space, and when it was wet, you never knew if you were on the surface or somewhere beneath it. Even hardened sailors found the monotony of constant rain depressing. The horizon dimmed as dark waves merged with banks of thick grey cloud, robbing the universe of light, shape and hope in a vision of desolation. (c) Q: ... not long afterwards the terror ceased. Or was it merely suspended? Are we using our reprieve? (c) Q: Even when speculation started about intelligence on other planets, Christianity managed to keep pace. After all, wasn't God at liberty to replicate creation as often as He liked? (c) Q: Perhaps it's time for humanity to enter a new phase of evolution and finally reconcile our primordial genetic inheritance with our development as a civilised race. If we want to prove ourselves worthy of the gift that is the Earth, it isn't the yrr we should be studying but ourselves. Amid our skyscrapers and computers we've learned to disavow our nature, but the path to a better future lies in knowing our origins. ... the yrr haven't changed the world. They've shown us how it really is. Nothing is as it was. Although, come to think of it, I haven't stopped smoking. We all need continuity of some kind, don't you think? (c) Q: How could we understand the ability of fish and seals to survive in the cold dark waters of the Antarctic? How could humans see inside a biotope that was sealed with layers of ice? What would the Earth look like from the sky, if we crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a goose? How did it feel to be a bee? How could we measure the speed of an insect's wings and its heartbeat, or monitor its blood pressure and eating patterns? What was the impact of human activities, like shipping noise or subsea explosions, on mammals in the depths? How could we follow animals to places where no human could venture? (c)