Kolbert's investigatory range reaches back to the Cambrian Period, but the findings are as acute and relevant as ever. This time, however, political overtones receive no mention, as if the anthology is a dispassionate observer's journey across history.

2014's The Sixth Extinction deserves parallel praise for the conversational approach to the complicated science and illustration of natural beauty amidst tragedy. CitationKolbert's (2006) book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, is similarly a collection of international vignettes, including a political critique of U.S. Her work appears in forums such as Vogue, Mother Jones, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She was a political and media reporter for the New York Times and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Kolbert has a decorated writing and journalism career among prominent intellectual platforms. In allowing readers themselves to decide the meanings and implications of her narrative, though, the question lingers if The Sixth Extinction too easily lets us choose to remain spectators and leave our unease in the armchair. Her account is firmly descriptive rather than prescriptive, and the book's 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction is fitting, as it invites audiences from all backgrounds to consider humanity's disproportionately large impact on the environment. At the same time, taken together, the tales themselves mirror Kolbert's larger lesson: Our actions add up to profound and potentially catastrophic consequences for the planet, even if human eyes do not capture the trend in our punctuated experiences. Kolbert's storytelling technique draws readers in and keeps their attention by breaking down the mammoth concept of climate change into digestible parts. She carefully situates humans on the natural history timeline, then uses firsthand field notes to build a case that human activity is engendering a mass extinction on par with the five biggest ones in fossil record. Elizabeth Kolbert uses her journalist lens to awe and vex us with cautionary tales of climate change: stories of animal and plant extinction and the efforts of scientists and citizens trying to rescue what remains. Although it is a nonfiction chronicle of how human action is changing the earth, atmosphere, and oceans on a scale and speed never before seen, the book is also a global adventure tracking 500 million years of history from the microscopic ammonite to our modern Pangaea. The Sixth Extinction could be a contemporary Gulliver's Travels for burgeoning climate scholars and curious minds. xiii and 319 pp., photos, diagrams, notes, bibliography, index.

The sixth great extinction book