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Furtado, P. gen.ed. 2008. 1001 Days that Shaped the World. Sydney. ABC Books. 960 pp. ISBN 9780733323102.
Given that there were millions of days from which to choose 1001 for inclusion in this book, it represents both a courageous and impossible challenge to its eleven authors. The book begins with the 'Big Bang', assuming this was the way Planet Earth was born, and it finishes with 'Earthquake in China', a tragic event that took place on May 12, 2008. The chronological scope of the book entails everything from the beginning until just last year, and to make more digestible the entirety of the earth's lifetime, Furtado and his colleagues have divided the book into what might be called chapters, with each representing a time period. The time periods vary in length. For example AD1-999 is a thousand years and occupies around eighty pages. The period from 1950 to the present is only forty-eight years and has the same number of pages. This can probably be explained by proximity...