The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Elizabeth Kolbert
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Elizabeth Kolbert
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Those who have enjoyed [Kolbert's] previous works like Field Notes From a Catastrophe will not be disappointed by her powerful new book.
... both a highly intelligent expression of this genre and also supremely well executed and entertaining.
[Kolbert's] writing here is the very model of explanatory journalism, making highly complex theories and hypotheses accessible to even the most science-challenged of readers, while providing a wonderfully tactile sense of endangered (or already departed) species and their shrinking habitats. She writes as a popularizer — or interpreter — of material that has been excavated by an army of scientists over the years and, in many cases, mapped by earlier writers.
To lay the groundwork for understanding this massive die-off, Kolbert crisply tells the stories of such earlier losses as the American mastodon and the great auk and provides an orienting overview of evolutionary and ecological science. She then chronicles her adventures in the field with biologists, botanists, and geologists investigating the threats against amphibians, bats, coral, and rhinos. Intrepid and astute, Kolbert combines vivid, informed, and awestruck descriptions of natural wonders, from rain forests to the Great Barrier Reef, and wryly amusing tales about such dicey situations as nearly grabbing onto a tree branch harboring a fist-sized tarantula, swimming among poisonous jellyfish, and venturing into a bat cave; each dispatch is laced with running explanations of urgent scientific inquiries and disquieting findings. Rendered with rare, resolute, and resounding clarity, Kolbert’s compelling and enlightening report forthrightly addresses the most significant topic of our lives..
Traversing four continents and animating scientists both living and long dead, Kolbert's narrative can be mesmerizing and awe-inspiring. It's also a bit terrifying. As evidence of our role in the current mass extinction event mounts, Kolbert illuminates this scientific mystery with a mix of history and field reporting. She weaves together the story of biological calamity, from the concept's first articulation in revolutionary France to the front lines of numerous extinctions today. Tellingly, these stories traverse land and sea, from remote Oceania to the author's own backyard.
The factoids Kolbert tosses off about nature’s incredible variety—a frog that carries eggs in its stomach and gives birth through its mouth, a wood stork that cools off by defecating on its own legs—make it heartbreakingly clear, without any heavy-handed sermonizing from the author, just how much we lose when an animal goes extinct. In the same way, her intrepid reporting from far-off places gives us a sense of the earth’s vastness and beauty. We get a sense of its danger, too, when Kolbert lets us in on her anxiety about entering caves, climbing cliffs, or diving into oceans alongside the scientists she shadows.
When I first read The Sixth Extinction, I thought there was a chapter missing. It might have been called 'Why We Should Care'.
While climate change and global warming have been debated for decades, Kolbert here examines our impact on the planet and makes a connection between the Earth’s next cataclysm and humankind.
... remarkable.
... a tour de horizon of the Anthropocene Age’s destructive maw, and it is a fascinating and frightening excursion.
The charm of this book (inasmuch as a book about extinction can have charm) lies in Kolbert's hands-on approach to her subject—searching for Panamanian frogs in the dark, hunting for graptolite fossils in Scotland, and observing coral spawning at Australia's Great Barrier Reef. This solid, engaging, multidisciplinary science title should appeal to a broad range of science enthusiasts, particularly those interested in environmental conservation..
... Kolbert evokes Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962)...Like Carson, Ms. Kolbert intends to raise an alarm.
Elizabeth Kolbert can be a very funny writer. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about her surprisingly breezy, entirely engrossing, and frequently entertaining tour through a half-billion years of the ups and precipitous downs of life on Earth (especially the downs) is Kolbert’s uncanny ability to induce smiles, snorts, and outright laughter as one reads about mass extinction, including humanity’s possible demise. It occurred to me at one point that if we do go the way of the ammonites and the mastodon, one of the human traits to disappear forever would be the capacity to crack wise in the face of oblivion.
... Kolbert offers well-composed snapshots of history, theory and observation that will fascinate, enlighten and appall many readers.
Kolbert accomplishes an amazing feat in her latest book, which superbly blends the depressing facts associated with rampant species extinctions and impending ecosystem collapse with stellar writing to produce a text that is accessible, witty, scientifically accurate, and impossible to put down.