It will not be long now before our older brat Eric can start taking in Virginia Lee Burton’s book Life Story. It is an amazing piece of work. Predating Edward Tufte by decades, this lady managed to squish the Earth’s biological history into a beautifully written and illustrated book supposedly for kids. It displays a technical rigour more appropriately found in a textbook, while managing the tricky business of smoothly changing the time/space scales as the story moves to its personal, tear-jerking conclusion. Maybe the book is too good to share and I’ll buy another copy just for me.