Now at a bookstore near you!
Read a Q&A with Edward, in the New York Times
“What a brilliant read. Dolnick elegantly sketches out the long-ago lives of the fossil hunters and Deep Time detectives whose labors will fuel scientific inquiry and the human imagination for as long as humanity manages to last. Dolnick’s enthusiasm and respect for his evocative subject shows on every page. He leaves readers both marveling at the known history of life on Earth and perhaps pondering their own place within it. I admired every bit of this book.”
—Paige Williams, New Yorker staff writer and author of The Dinosaur Artist, a 2018 New York Times notable book
“An exuberant tale… Intriguing… A delightful, engrossing confluence of Victorian science and history.”
—Kirkus
“Dolnick, whose previous work, The Writing of the Gods (2022), made history come vibrantly alive, does the same thing here; he walks us through the first half of the nineteenth century, telling the story through the people who made it happen, and shows us how the world came to terms with shocking revelations about earth’s history. A masterful and enormously entertaining book.”
—Booklist
My new book is a true story that begins with one of history’s most astonishing crime scenes. In England, around 1800, people unearthed enormous bones — bones that reached as high as a man’s head — that no one had ever seen before.
What could they be? Elephants? Giants?
They turned out to be dinosaur bones, although no one in the 1800s had ever imagined such things as dinosaurs. As far as anyone knew, the only animals that had ever lived were the ones from Noah’s Ark. No one had ever dreamed that the world had once swarmed with lizards as big as mini-vans.
The Writing of the Gods
Egypt was the mightiest and longest-lived empire the world has ever seen, and the most mysterious. Countless monuments and texts swarmed with hieroglyphs, but no one in the world knew how to read them. Then, in 1799, French soldiers discovered the Rosetta Stone. But what seemed like an answer to an age-old riddle turned out to be only a starting point. The Writing of the Gods tells the story of the thrilling, twenty-year-long race to decipher the hieroglyphs and solve one of history’s greatest mysteries.
The New York Times called The Writing of the Gods “exuberant” and “engrossing” and “thrilling.”
Read the review here.
The New Yorker devoted a long, enthusiastic review to The Writing of the Gods and called it “sophisticated” and “lively.”
Read the review here.
The Christian Science Monitor called The Writing of the Gods “fascinating” and “masterful” and “clear and engaging” and “illuminating” and “engrossing.”
The Economist said that The Writing of the Gods tells a story that “will astonish readers” and called the book “short, accessible, and highly entertaining.”
The Minneapolis Star Tribune said that The Writing of the Gods reads “like a thriller” and is “captivating” and “meticulous” and “entertaining.”
For other reviews click here.