It was an interesting book though, and it's certainly got a great cover, as you can see here. Click the image to see it larger.

To the scores:

Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History, by Peter D. Ward
Concept: 8
Presentation: 5
Writing Quality: 6
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 6
Entertainment Value: 4
Rereadability: 5
Overall: 6

Gorgon isn't a bad book, and it does explain the issue pretty well. The issue is the greatest (known) mass extinction in earth's history, which took place at the end of the Permian Era, millions of years before dinosaurs and their eventual end in the far better known K/T extinction, which was caused largely by the impact of a meteor into the Yucatan Peninsula. It had long been known that there was a huge extinction at the end of the Permian Era, 250 million years ago, and that something like 90% of the living species on earth died in it; far more than perished in the K/T extinction. What was not known until just a few years ago, was exactly when the Permian extinction occurred, how the animals and plants died, and what caused it. In fact, there were vast gaps in the scientific knowledge about the subject, and after spending the first decade of his professional life researching the dinosaur-killing K/T extinction, largely in undersea fault lines in the Atlantic, Peter Ward changed focus once that mystery was all but solved, and started to research the Permian extinction, largely by working in the Karoo desert in South Africa.

Gorgon describes over a decade and a half of his life as he returns time and again to the incredibly-inhospitable Karoo, develops new theories about the Permian extinction, researches the time line and causes, surveys the work of other scientists in the field, and eventually comes to some less than iron-clad conclusions about the whole issue. If that was all the book covered (and that's all you expect it to cover from the book jacket info) it would have been a quality science book, and have been a lot shorter than 236 pages. On top of the science though, Ward spends dozens of pages talking about working in South Africa under and during the fall of Apartheid, describes the other paleontologists he works with in the Karoo, talks about missing his family back in Seattle, gives background info about the first scientists to pioneer geology in the Karoo, describes what it's like hunting for fossils in a baking hot desert, details the painstaking collection of rock cores, and much more. It's a very thorough and wide-ranging book, part textbook, part diary, part character sketch, part ethnography, etc. Unfortunately it's not a great example of any of these genres, and rather than filling me with bits of info from every direction, it left me wanting more or less of everything.

The other scientists are described in detail, down to their personality quirks and eating habits, but since all the observations strive to remain tone-neutral and non-judgmental, and all are superficial and not gossipy or juicy, they aren't very informative or interesting. I never felt like I knew anyone as well as I wanted to, and no one seemed as alive as the characters in a good novel. Basically, they were well done character sketches for a scientist-author, and very detailed for a scientific book, but not good enough to work in a work of fiction, and since that's the tone and voice Ward used to describe them, it wasn't great writing.

The process of finding and digging up fossils was covered, but almost entirely from the perspective of someone in the field. This aspect of the book is done pretty well, or at least very thoroughly, but while we hear about every physical detail, and get a fair amount of Ward's mental state during such hunts, I got bored reading about them. Another day trekking along, weighed down by a gallon of water, sweating in the heat or freezing in the unusually cold weather, eating lunch and feeling hungry for dinner, etc. It's all too physical and moment- to- moment, with not enough evaluation or analysis. I also wanted to know what it was like for the others doing the hunting, especially for the team leader and fossil-hunting master, Roger Smith. What did they think about? What drove them, especially the others who were never going to gain any career advancement or fame from it? I would also have liked to learn more about how fossils were processed back in the museum. How were they removed from the dirt and plaster casts? How are they mounted? Who decides how to pose them and display them? When do other scientists look them over to make more detailed observations than could be made in the field? These are basically trivial questions, but when you see the level of detail Ward goes into about finding the bones in the first place, you'll see why I expected more of the entire process.

The other aspects of science are well-covered, but in similarly- spotty fashion. Ward will talk about something and simply take for granted that we know all about it; how fossils are formed, how continental drift functions, or how volcanism and erosion reform the landscape, etc, and then suddenly spend 4 pages explaining in great detail how a rock core saw works, and how the resulting cores are heated in ovens to measure the age by counting the various types of carbon molecules that the heat releases. It's very informative, but in odd bursts, and I ended up knowing far more about some things than I needed to know, while never getting the background info on other things that seemed far more important to the book and science on the whole.

The overview of world wide research into the Permian extinction was spotty as well. He hit upon a few big discoveries by other teams, but never gave us enough of a survey to know just where the work he was doing fit in, or how important it really was, worldwide. He mentioned just one scientist (not on his team) by name, but only since she was very wrong about a major finding, and he apparently only brought that one up since she holds a personal grudge against him and recently screwed him out of a spot he had on a trip to the Antarctic. But even that info was presented in objective form, and completely without emotion or detail, when some juicy slamming of her would have been interesting, and fit perfectly into the book.

On the whole, I can see what Ward was trying to do, and why it didn't really work. He had great material for a great book, but he pulled his punches on most of it for various reasons. Ward wanted to write a book about science, while working in his own diary-style observations from over a decade of hard work on the cutting (digging?) edge of research into the Permian extinction controversy. He did, but while intentionally leavening the science so as not to overwhelm and bore and scare off non-scientists. The problem with that approach is that nothing else in the book is compelling enough to keep you reading, and when 236 pages of book boils down to little more science info than could be fitted into a 10 or 12 page article in Discover or Nature, it feels a bit padded out.

The padding wasn't meant to be padding though, since it's good stuff, and could be as or more interesting than the science, or at least compliment it well. Rather than sticking purely to the science, Ward tried to inject personalities into the book; his own and those of other scientists he worked with. Unfortunately he's not a good enough writer to really make anyone come alive, and for professional reasons he didn't want to slander or gossip or say anything very mean about anyone. So lots of great stuff is hinted at, but he can't tell a story well enough to get the reader lost in it, and since the juiciest details are never elaborated on, we know everyone, but distantly. It felt like a documentary about their research, but one that had the best scenes censored and that never went deeper than the surface. We needed a first-hand movie, rather than an objectively-observing documentary. Ward constantly writes that he wondered how person A or person B felt about him or their work, but he never speculates, or takes the simple step of asking them. He was there working with them for months, several times over a decade, but never seems to have learned more about anyone than what they muttered over their morning coffee. His character sketches and descriptions of interactions are all superficial; we know what everyone looks like and how they work, but we know nothing of their inner emotions, and even with Ward himself we don't know more than how tired or hot or worried he is. There's never anything really revealing or personal about how he envied or hated or lusted or whatever anyone else.

Really, the more I think about it the less I realize Ward told. He gave a lot of info about himself and how he was feeling, but it's not info anyone didn't know already. He's hot in the summer, cold in the winter, tired a lot in the field, and worries that he'll be bitten by African ticks, and that he won't hold his own fossil gathering. Basically, all of the interpersonal stuff would have been much better if it had been written by a real writer, and one who wasn't a scientist who didn't want to burn any bridges or embarrass anyone with this book. It's very much a "tell some" when a "tell all" would have been truly fascinating.

On the whole though, Gorgon is a good book. I went in knowing nothing about the Permian extinction, and I came out feeling pretty well informed about it. I could have learned as much about that from a quick journal article, but I wouldn't have had such an intimate knowledge of how the information was unearthed. I also know a lot about Peter Ward and his colleagues, but only on a surface level, and honestly, I could have learned as much from a ten-page article on them; not that a science journal would have hosted such a piece. The same goes for the changes South Africa went through in the late 80s and 90s, the process of drilling rock cores, and any number of other things the book covered. I would have liked much more about many things though, especially about what life was actually like in the Permian, before the extinction.

I guess I enjoyed Gorgon, and I read the whole thing, but it was pretty slow in places, and the fact that we still don't know the answers to most of the major questions about the Permian extinction nags at me. As various others say in their Amazon.com reviews, you can simply read the final chapter to get 90% of the scientific stuff, and even then you're left with more questions than answers. Ward eventually gets around to presenting his new theories and the best info to date, but when he does he almost slips them in without making real arguments about them. He has an interesting idea that low oxygen in the atmosphere caused the Permian extinctions, and that that condition lasted so long that dinosaurs evolved in a low-oxygen time. That would explain the huge lungs and seeming high altitude evolutionary adaptations they and their avian descendents have, but there's still nothing to explain exactly why the earth's oxygen dropped so precipitously at the end of the Permian Era, other than vague "It must have been caused, in some way, by a meteor hitting the planet, which triggered massive oxidation since all of these rocks are rust-red."

Overall this book is not worth owning, unless you are absolutely nuts about the Permian Extinction or Peter Ward or paleontology. It's worth checking out from the library (which is what I did) and it's worth reading the first couple and last couple of chapters, while skimming through the rest. I admire Ward's efforts to spin a yarn from an interesting scientific riddle and a decade of hands on research, but I'm too critical a reader to pronounce his efforts a ringing success.