The recap
Life on Earth has been through five great mass extinctions, catastrophes that erased a large share of living things. Elizabeth Kolbert asks whether we are now living through a sixth, and whether this time the asteroid is us. Her method is reporting rather than lecturing: she travels to rainforests, coral reefs, museum archives and field stations, joining the scientists who are documenting losses as they happen. Each chapter centers on a particular creature, among them a vanishing Panamanian frog, the long-gone great auk and a struggling Sumatran rhino, and uses it to open up a larger idea, from how naturalists first came to accept that species can disappear to how the chemistry of the oceans is shifting. Kolbert is a precise, dryly funny writer who lets the evidence make the argument, steering clear of both doom-mongering and false comfort. The result is a sobering yet deeply readable account of how a single species became a geological force, and what that means for everything else alive.
Why read it
For readers who want to understand the biodiversity crisis through vivid, on-the-ground reporting rather than statistics alone. It suits anyone who likes travel writing with real scientific stakes.
Fun facts
- 01
It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
- 02
The book grew out of a 2008 scientific paper on amphibians and the sixth mass extinction, which led Kolbert to write a New Yorker piece called "The Sixth Extinction?" after reporting on frogs in Panama; she then realized there was a whole book to write.
- 03
Al Gore reviewed it for The New York Times Book Review and praised Kolbert as one of the finest science writers at work.
- 04
Besides the Pulitzer, it became a New York Times bestseller, and a tenth-anniversary edition has since been published.
“one of our very best science writers”
