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On the summer reading list of President Obama, it raises enough curiosity to pick up this book on a foreign topic – the history of species evolution and extinction.

The author Elizabeth Kolbert draws her audience in this unusual topic and does a fantastic job in reporting about species evolution and extinction in this planet.  Elizabeth not only makes the topic interesting, it makes it relevant why we care about species diversity, about ocean acidification and about mega fauna extinction. In her journey, she visited different places that had made a mark in the species evolution or extinction.  Everywhere she goes – she reports the past, the present, the story and its adventures through first hand conversations and hands-on experience.

The book starts with the extinction of a few frog species; and in thirteen chapters, each tracks a species that is emblematic – the American mastodian, the great auk, an ammonite talks about extinct species; the increasingly fragmented Amazon rainforest, the ocean acidification and the endangered corals at Great Barrier Reef talk about the present landscape; plus many more around mammals and human.     If any of these is new to you, the author will carry you to these new territories.

In the chapter on theory of mega fauna extinction, it is mind boggling on how human arrival may correlate the closest the species extinction when human predators unintentionally disrupts their long reproductive cycle; and the species reduction triggers forest overgrowth, then climate change.  And how modern human species drive to extinction o
f its cousin such as Neanderthal; the uniqueness of human bring madness, creativity and at the same time its destructive power which drives species extinction and one day could be our own.

The book is educational and entertaining; it tells an unnatural history of species evolution and the evolving theory about it.  I love reading about the stories, and learn a lot more than expected.  It gives a deeper appreciation of what is going on in the planet; and why we want to sustain the species diversity.

If the above topics do not interest you, wait till you start reading the book.

Posted in About Learning, Book Review - English