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A review by rubiscodisco
The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions by David Quammen
3.0
The book is a very informative retrospective of biodiversity conservation and human-caused extinctions from a scientific perspective. However, I don't think the author created a very clear synthesis of all his points at the end of his book, instead, covering all developments on the topic and then dropping into an ending abruptly. The closest thing to a synthesis he makes is at the introduction of the book, by way of a useful metaphor, but I didn't really see how he made things come together at the end.
On the positives, this book is a very thorough who's who of people involved in the study of ecology and biological conservation. It almost serves as a layman's historical review on biogeography and conservation biology. The scope, both in time, and location, was expansive, and the author has a challengingly obscure vocabulary - fun to look up the very strange words that he uses.
Reading this book was really slow going for me. I kept waiting for him to get to a point, a stance, and it just never happened. It was one circuitous anecdote and interview to another. It didn't help that a lot of this wasn't new information to me, so there wasn't a lot of the thrill of learning new things. He could also be condescending or just... obliviously caucasian, let's just say, which earns an eye roll from me here and there.
On the positives, this book is a very thorough who's who of people involved in the study of ecology and biological conservation. It almost serves as a layman's historical review on biogeography and conservation biology. The scope, both in time, and location, was expansive, and the author has a challengingly obscure vocabulary - fun to look up the very strange words that he uses.
Reading this book was really slow going for me. I kept waiting for him to get to a point, a stance, and it just never happened. It was one circuitous anecdote and interview to another. It didn't help that a lot of this wasn't new information to me, so there wasn't a lot of the thrill of learning new things. He could also be condescending or just... obliviously caucasian, let's just say, which earns an eye roll from me here and there.