Kenneth Hsu - Notable Writings

Notable Writings

Hsu authored or edited over 20 books, many in multiple languages, and was elected an International Writer of the Year by the International Book Club (Cambridge, UK) in 2003.

The Mediterranean Was A Desert, 1982

The book concerned Hsu's work deciphering the Messinian Salinity Crisis and provided a first-hand account of one of the most significant deep-sea drilling cruises ever launched. The voyage, Leg 13 of the D/V Glomar Challenger, was undertaken in 1970 and led to the hypothesis that 5.5 million years ago, the Mediterranean was a desert. It documented the adventures of the oceanographic expedition and offered portraits of 'big' science and 'big' scientists at work, with human touches, as a memoir for historians of science. The book was selected by Philip Morrison of Scientific American as one of the 100 most significant and influential books of science in the 20th century. A film was also made by PBS, based on the book.

Challenger At Sea, 1983

The book was an overview of the then current state of marine geology and a source book for the history of that science, and was used as a geology textbook for non-majors.

The Great Dying, 1986

The book described the circumstances leading to the discovery that the dinosaur extinction was triggered by a cometary impact. An inquiry into the nature of survival and extinction, it was published in 6 languages, selling over 170,000 copies worldwide, selling 28,000 copies in the United States between 1986 and 1988; 100,000 copies in Mainland China in 1989 and 40,000 copies in Taiwan. A popular newspaper in Taipei United Post featured The Great Dying in its weekly list of best-selling books list for more than a year, and it was chosen as a top non-fiction book of the year in August 1992. Originally intended to teach the public, the book was used as a textbook in the United States for its scientific method. A film was also made based on the book by ZDF.

In the book, Hsu marshalled "some of the most gripping and controversial geological discoveries of our time to blast Darwin’s claim and to shake the foundations of his evolutionary theory," showing evidence indicating a meteor collided with the Earth, 65 million years ago, leaving much of it uninhabitable, and warning that a similar event may threaten humanity in the future.

Klima Macht Geschichte, 2000

Klima Macht Geschichte presented a theory of climate and history, looking at future climate changes based on historical, archaeological and helio-biological evidence. It made the prediction of global cooling of the planet in the last decades of the 21st century, and the coming of a little ice age before 2500. The claim forecast was corroborated by scientists Khabibullo Abdusamatov, Yuk Yung, John Cassey, Nigel Calder, Henrik Svensmark, Alexander Chizhevsky and John D. Hamaker . Orell Fussli Verlag published the book after an article about Hsu appeared in Bilanz Magazine in 1998. Earlier, in 1992, Hsu wrote in Geographical Magazine, "Perhaps our species was created by Gaia to prevent a catastrophic chill" in reference to his published paper 'Is Gaia Endothermic?, on which the book is also based.

Amadeus & Magdalena, 2002

Published in Chinese, English and German, with a Chinese translation titled “莫扎特的愛與死”., the book presented Hsu's musicological theory about the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.