Life (but not the universe or everything)

I think this is the book on paleontology that Bill Bryson would have written if Bill Bryson was a paleontologist (and that's a good thing, in my opinion).

Fortey's book, as the subtitle tells you, is a natural history of the first four billion years on earth. He starts with the earliest single-celled organisms, and ends with the appearance of human civilisation, and in a nice twist, spends roughly a proportionate number of pages on each era. Since this implies that at least 2/3 of the book gets devoted to trilobites, prokaryotes, and creatures with about the charisma of slime molds (such as slime molds themselves), you might think it would get pretty boring pretty quickly. But Fortey manages to strike a great balance between amusing anecdotes about scientists (including himself) and actually telling you about the creatures involved. Too much of the former, and it would seem frivolous; too much of the latter, and you might as well just read a textbook. By the time you get to dinosaurs, you've really got a sense of just how late in the game they turned up. It goes without saying that humans barely make an appearance.

Basically, the writing is very entertaining without coming across as condescending, and it makes the whole thing extremely readable for non-scientists. Three cheers for fossils!