I wanted to like this book so bad it hurt.  Having been fascinated by the more unexplored pieces of our world in the “Planet Earth” documentary, I’d been thinking for a few months: if we did our worst, if we really made the world uninhabitable for ourselves, would it be so bad?  Wouldn’t the world recover, with life from the depths and the heavens, and eventually erase our memory, and heal its wounds?  Suddenly, I saw a book called “The World Without Us,” which seemed to be a book-length exploration of just that question.

     The information in this book is, truly, incredibly interesting, but author Alan Weisman lacks the ability that great science writers possess (I’m specifically thinking of Matt Ridley and David Quammen here) to arrange not just a series of digestible scientific facts, but to form them into a narrative as well.  At the end of the book, I didn’t feel like I’d read a book: I felt like I’d read a very disorganized outline.  The most sensible part of the book is the “Post-Human Extinction Timeline” on the dust jacket; that puts things in chronological order.  The book itself though, jumps from too general to too specific.  I would have appreciated Weisman err towards the overly vague: for example, a chapter titled “What Will Remain” primarily focuses on the post-human fate of one building, leaving the reader to extrapolate the rest of our infrastructure’s fate from there.  I wish this chapter would have given a wider view, even if only slightly wider, of what would remain, instead of just discussing one building in Istanbul.  Perhaps that would have been an impossible task, I don’t know.

     There were things I enjoyed about the book.  Weisman was talented enough to keep me from getting completely lost, and his brass tacks writing ability is fine: in other words, sentences and paragraphs weren’t malformed.  It was the shape of the whole book that gave me trouble; rather than forming a narrative line, the chapters are often completely unrelated to each other, as is information contained therein, and it feels like the whole book traces a wide, lumpy circle around a fascinating central idea, instead of taking us on a straight line through it, with a defined starting point and a clear destination.

     I appreciate the questions this book asks, and I love the way it asks them: it doesn’t presuppose a reason for its potential mass extinction of humanity, and Weisman encourages the reader to imagine it’s the rapture if they want, or global warming if that works better.  There’s great facts in it too, like the fact that domesticated house cats would be some of the most successful creatures on the planet if we were to die, or the startling image of cattle farms left unattended, with barely mobile steaks just sitting there waiting for the coyotes to eat them.  But the fact is this book would have done better with a more rigorous editor, or a more experienced writer.  It’s worth flipping through, but I wouldn’t recommend taking the whole plunge, unless you’re that desperate for answers.  If not, wait for someone to do a better job answering the question of what our world would be like, without us.