Rachel Sussman traveled all over the world taking photographs of organisms older than 2,000 years old. Beautiful and amazing how old some of these trees and plants are. ( )

A coffee table book almost large and heavy enough to be used as a coffee table. Very much the tip of an iceberg - the creation of the book must have been a bit like performance art - a book built on 10 years of research, travelling, returning, living and sifting of material. Beautifully produced, a thing of beauty, yet however awesome the pictures are, they are always about the living things, never about the picture. And the personal account of the encounters with the living things struck just the right chord with me. I dipped into the book, skimmed and picked on things that interested me - then started at the beginning and read through to the end over several months, an evening here and an evening there. ( )

A coffee table book almost large and heavy enough to be used as a coffee table. Very much the tip of an iceberg - the creation of the book must have been a bit like performance art - a book built on 10 years of research, travelling, returning, living and sifting of material. Beautifully produced, a thing of beauty, yet however awesome the pictures are, they are always about the living things, never about the picture. And the personal account of the encounters with the living things struck just the right chord with me. I dipped into the book, skimmed and picked on things that interested me - then started at the beginning and read through to the end over several months, an evening here and an evening there. ( )

This is a painfully beautiful book. I filled me with longing and a desire to go see the inhabitants of the pages myself. ( )

The Oldest Living Things in the World took Rachel Sussman ten years of travel, photography and writing to produce. This is a beautiful book. It is full of pictures and descriptions of plants (and one animal) that have survived for millenia. There are soil bacteria in Siberia 400 to 600,00 years old, a colony of Aspen in Utah 80,000 and some sea grass off Spain 100,000 years old. Not surprisingly the old desert plants like the 12,000 year old yucca or creosote in the Mojave desert aren't really very pretty, but both the 2,200 to 5,500 year old Antarctic Moss and the 2,000 year old Chilean Llareta (which she describes as a kind of parsley) are quite beautiful. The Llareta grows a centimeter in 100 years, and some people have been known to burn it for heat. The destruction almost takes my breath away. These organisms have survived millenia of assaults and are now being threatened by human growth and/or stupidity and climate change. ( )