Subtitled: A Search for Who We Are
(Random House, Oct 1992, xvi + 505pp, including 85pp of notes, permissions acknowledgements, and index.)
This is perhaps Carl Sagan’s most substantial book, on the grounds that it’s through-written as a single composition; it’s not a compilation or fix-up of previously written magazine pieces, as THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD was, or an edited series of lectures, as THE VARIETIES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE WAS, or aligned by chapter to episodes of a TV show, like COSMOS was, or a book aligned to an earlier book, like THE PALE BLUE DOT was.
And on the grounds that it takes a wide perspective, a sort of 10,000 foot view of a period of history not examined by most books about evolution, or the cosmos, or human history. It’s about the history of life up until humanity’s ancestors came on the stage, and so it outlines how and why life on Earth came to be, and how things like competition and violence necessarily came to characterize life on Earth.











