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erlst 's review for:
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Expectations with this one were through the roof. It didn’t live up to them, my fault. I enjoyed (not quite the right word) learning about the individual species’ extinctions, but it read more like chapter-length species specific biographies that didn’t explicitly connect these extinctions to any of the five mass extinctions that I was hoping this entire book was going to be about.
I learned a lot about mastodons, ammonites, penguins, corvids, etc., but almost nothing about the five previous mass extinctions themselves. And I was hoping for waaaaaay more page time discussion on the ongoing sixth extinction, it’s literally the title of the book.
This book—a close-study of specific species going extinct—is the easier one to write rather than what I was hoping would be a synthesis of each previous mass extinction that uses facts to correlate to something of a proof that we are currently in the sixth extinction. Though this still had a lot of great insights and was entertaining throughout, I was hoping for a book I could reference back to often, not a short story collection on species dying out.
I learned a lot about mastodons, ammonites, penguins, corvids, etc., but almost nothing about the five previous mass extinctions themselves. And I was hoping for waaaaaay more page time discussion on the ongoing sixth extinction, it’s literally the title of the book.
This book—a close-study of specific species going extinct—is the easier one to write rather than what I was hoping would be a synthesis of each previous mass extinction that uses facts to correlate to something of a proof that we are currently in the sixth extinction. Though this still had a lot of great insights and was entertaining throughout, I was hoping for a book I could reference back to often, not a short story collection on species dying out.