IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS Stephen J. Gould, followed by Richard Fortey — or at least many now regard these two as the pioneers of popular accounts about fossils and travel. It’s a genre that never goes away, as shown by the spectacular success last year of Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands: A World in the Making.

But, in fact, this history of popular geology writing is as old as the geological sciences themselves: take Hugh Miller’s (1841, and. So what does Ken McNamara’s add to an already busy bookshelf?