A sobering and, to be honest, scary book about the possible (probable?) coming "sixth extinction", following 5 previous catastrophic extinctions, this time by human hands. In each chapter, Kolbert (who actually lives in my state), tells the story of previous "extinctions" or the one that seems imminent. The last chapter, entitled The Thing With Feathers, discusses one of the last `alalā, an Hawaiian crow and how we have a choice to make. She doesn't sound very optimistic and, to be honest, I am even more pessimistic these days than she is, which brought a tear to me eye a few times reading this chapter.

Speaking of tears, I think the saddest chapter was the one called The New Pangea, which describes the sad plight of a local to me animal, Myotis lucifugus, or little brown bat. They are dying by the millions due to "white nose syndrome", an example of an "invasive" carried about by modern technology, finding a host that isn't ready to deal with it. While European bats seemed to have found an equilibrium with the bacteria, it kills the North American bats, although oddly, no one is really sure why it kills them. This chapter also describes other disastrous immigrants, like fungus that killed all the local chestnuts, or the snake in Guam that decimated the bird species and 2 of the three mammal species there.

More stunning was the chapter on the coral reefs. I drove my wife batty (pardon the pun!) by reading all the incredible statistics about reefs she tosses out. And just how terrible the plight of the corals is currently. It seems to be almost too late to do anything any more, a depressing thought. While we have snorkled at the Great Barrier Reef, I would surely love it if my kids and my kids' kids could as well.

An amazing book that is just breathtaking in its breadth and, to be honest, sadness. Glad I read it, but I am getting depressed all over again thinking about it. She ends with this quote:

Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human—some of my best friends are humans!—I will say that it is not, in the end, what’s most worth attending to. Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.