Read decently by the author (I'm a big advocate of authors reading their own material for audio-books if they can), this book gave me mixed feelings at times. Overall, on balance though, I considered it a worthy read. The aim of it is to discuss how this planet changed over the course of the ice ages in North America, with a reference here and there to other parts of the world, and how this affected humans and their habits and migratory patterns. The way the author does it is to take trips and relate his experiences to things that may - or may not - have happened to ice age peoples who lived on the North American continent back then.
There's a lot of information dispensed here, but it's often mixed in with the author's own personal experiences and sometimes I think this muddies the waters. At one point he writes a mild admonishment that we should not imagine that people back then necessarily viewed the world in the same way we do today, and under different conditions. They had their own lives and drives, he advises, but then he goes right back to relating his experiences to theirs! It sounded a bit ambiguous.
The text is evocative and sometimes overly imaginative, but it never gets wildly out of control and it does tell an interesting story that really makes a reader (or in this case a listener) think about these things in new ways, which is what I liked about this. There's some technical information, but not an unwelcome amount, and I enjoyed that - learning about an era which is often not covered in the textbooks that like to ramble on about dinosaurs or early African hominids. It gave me some good perspectives about life back then, and on how hardy and creative these people were, and what they had to contend with. I commend this as a worthy listen.
