Secrets of the Soil by Peter Tompkins
Published 1989 · 444 pages · 150,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Science & Nature
How hard is Secrets of the Soil to read?
Secrets of the Soil scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
- The book moves between soil chemistry (humus, trace elements, cation exchange, nitrogen fixation), anthroposophical terms from Rudolf Steiner's biodynamics, and the invented vocabularies of radionics and paramagnetism. Readers meet unfamiliar technical words on most pages, though the authors write for a lay audience.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Tompkins and Bird write in journalistic prose with long sentences that string together names, dates and claims. Quotations from researchers and farmers break up the exposition; the grammar itself is rarely demanding.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Much of the book reports concrete experiments, farms and crop yields, but it repeatedly leaps to cosmic energies, life forces and planetary healing. Those metaphysical passages sit on top of practical accounts of composting and rock dust.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Each chapter profiles a new researcher or method, from Steiner's biodynamic preparations and Julius Hensel's rock dust to Philip Callahan's work on insects and paramagnetism and John Hamaker's remineralisation thesis. The volume of names, figures and claims is high, and the chapters stand largely alone.
How Secrets of the Soil is regarded
Secrets of the Soil holds a literary regard score of 31 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.