The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
The winners of the Pulitzer Prize were announced this week, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction won in the category of General Nonfiction. I’ve followed Kolbert since she published her three groundbreaking “Climate of Man” articles on climate change in the New Yorker in April and May of 2005, articles that became part of her 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and I’m excited to see her get this level of recognition. The stories of global warming and biodiversity loss covered in these two books are every bit the bummer their titles suggest, but Kolbert brings such intelligence to the topics and has such a gift for anchoring general trends in stories of particular places and people that they become page-turners. The Sixth Extinction begins with the tale of the emergence of Homo sapiens some two hundred thousand years ago and their curious habit of killing off many of the species they came in contact with . . .
Read More