Planet Earth: As You've Never Seen It Before » (1st Edition)

Alastair Fothergill is the series producer of Planet Earth and the director of Earth, the associated feature film. He studied zoology at the University of Durham and made his first film, on the Okavango, while still a student. Fothergill joined BBC Natural History United in 1983, working on The Really Wild Show, Wildlife on One, and the series The Trials of Life. He was appointed head of the unit in 1992, and during his tenure he produced the award-winning series Life in the Freezer.
In 1998, he produced the hugely successful series The Blue Planet. He has also presented several television programs, including The Abyss, and is the author of three books.

"Planet Earth is more astonishing and compelling than anything that can be brought from a computer as special effects. . . . An example of how marvelous program-making can be."—A. A. Gill, Sunday Times

"It has some of the most stunning photography ever seen."—Hermione Eyre,
Independent on Sunday

"These programs should be compulsory viewing for every school child, before they start to believe that it does not matter what happens to other species on this planet."—Philip Coggan, Financial Times

Publishers Weekly

In this gorgeous coffee-table book, an offshoot of the Discovery Channel/ BBC series of the same name, zoologist and BBC producer Fothergill takes readers on a kaleidoscopic tour of the flora, fauna and natural history of the Earth's poles, forests, plains, deserts, mountains and oceans. The series of jaw-dropping photographs starts with a view of Earth from the moon (and pointing out the obvious but shocking fact that no one has been able to see it live since the 1972 Apollo 17mission). Other images reveal the astonishing variety of geology and life around the globe, including an emperor penguin eyeing an enormous jade-green iceberg; a grove of ancient monkey puzzle trees on the slopes of the Andes; a wild (and endangered) two-humped Bactrian camel strolling with her calf across the Gobi Desert; a long-furred, red-eyed gelada (a kind of primate) perched on a cliff in the Ethiopian highlands; a cave explorer parachuting into Mexico's 1,100-foot-deep Cave of Swallows; a blimplike nerpa (the only known fresh-water seal) swimming through Siberia's Lake Baikal; and the lacy undulations of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta captured by satellite. The book's only drawback is its large size and heavy weight, which makes for cumbersome reading. (Mar.)