Earth

by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

"Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In Earth , a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a ?blue marble,? ?a blue pale dot,? or, as Chaucer described it, ?this litel spot of erthe,? the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a reservoir of...