Reviews

From the cover, title, and subtitle, I got the impression that the book was about animals facing extinction. It's actually more about the people who created the field of animal conservation. Some of the chapters were more interesting to me than others, as she sometimes went into great detail about the personal lives of some of these people. I didn't know much conservationists so I didn't recognize many of the names but I suspect that they would be more familiar to those in the field.

I appreciated the way the author addressed the complexity of issues; one of the main takeaways for me was that this issue has no simple, black-and-white prescription for every situation. For example, hunting is not all good or all bad. She discussed how many early people fighting for conservation were hunters with the goal of keeping animals around to hunt for sport (and often had racist and/or colonial attitudes). This was in contrast to the communities in Africa that use trophy hunting as a way to fund their conservation and cull aggressive animals.

On the writing side, there were very clear transitions from chapter to chapter. The end notes and further reading were very thorough and helpful. The book was very much centered in America but I think it would be impossible to cover the whole world in one book. The author did explicitly discuss how privilege and colonialism shaped the attitudes of those involved and how those attitudes have held back some of their efforts. I would be interested in a more global history in another book.