David Rickard

I found this a slightly frustrating book. One the one hand it is full of interesting information about the role of Pyrite in our world. On the other hand it tends to be repetitive, poorly edited and the style is often convoluted and somewhat hard to follow. The illustrations are generally very poorly reproduced..and maybe even the originals were not great pictures. A section of colour plates has been included ....but they simply reproduce the black and white photos which are attached to the text. (All slightly annoying). Rickard is clearly a great authority on Pyrite and this book is apparently a condensation of another huge monograph that he wrote on the subject; this version written for popular consumption. But I think he has confused popular readership with somewhat dumbing down......hence the repetition. I think the book would have benefitted mightily from the inclusion of a few diagrams showing the pyrite-sulphur cycles which we readers could refer to as required and a table showing the various forms of pyrite and some simple properties or their derivations ......would also have been helpful.
Rickard has a kind of "Gee-whiz" approach ...maybe over-claiming ...in which pyrite is at the root of every good thing in the universe. OK pyrite was apparently a key part of a fire lighting kit used for striking sparks...and hence cooked food....better health....camp fires and cultural development ....or maybe fire could also be produced by friction with wood. Some of the headings are a bit exuberant: "Pyrite feeds the world", "Pyrite, civilisation, and culture" and so on.
I bought the book because I was aware that pyrite may have played a role in the origins of life on earth but was not really prepared for the quite profound impact that the mineral in all its forms has on our world.
Rickard packs a lot of interesting information into his book. The pyrite framboids....tiny regular spheres that have frequently been mistaken for living forms; the ability to date rocks by the varying percentages of isotopes of sulphur in the rocks. The fact that the now accepted spelling of sulphur is "sulfur"; the likelihood that with climate change less oxygen can dissolve in warmer water and we will get increasing areas of dead ocean.
I give the book four stars mainly because of the interesting information but it's not especially well written. Maybe a really good editor might have been able to turn this into a seriously good book and not something that seems to carry the relics of being a cut-down version of the larger monograph.… (mehr)