The Sixth Extinction

by Elizabeth Kolbert Narrated by Anne Twomey

Overview

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
From the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a powerful and important work about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a compelling account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.

Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.

The Sixth Extinction draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines-geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, and marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. Elizabeth Kolbert, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer, accompanies many of these researchers into the field, and introduces you to a dozen species-some already gone, others facing extinction-that are being affected by the sixth extinction.

Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

Editorial Reviews

MAY 2014 - AudioFile

There have been five major extinction events in our planet’s history, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s disquieting book argues that we're now causing the sixth. Sadly, her powerful message is undermined by the production’s languid narration. Anne Twomey reads in a conspiratorial whisper. Kolbert describes how human colonization and climate change are threatening countless species, and her narrative is tied together with the stories of extinct creatures from ammonites and mastodons to the great auk and the recently vanished golden toad. Many of the these stories are told from the viewpoints of research scientists she visited on the front lines. These dispatches from the field add both color and urgency to an audiobook that deserves a better delivery. D.B. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

MAY 2014 - AudioFile

There have been five major extinction events in our planet’s history, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s disquieting book argues that we're now causing the sixth. Sadly, her powerful message is undermined by the production’s languid narration. Anne Twomey reads in a conspiratorial whisper. Kolbert describes how human colonization and climate change are threatening countless species, and her narrative is tied together with the stories of extinct creatures from ammonites and mastodons to the great auk and the recently vanished golden toad. Many of the these stories are told from the viewpoints of research scientists she visited on the front lines. These dispatches from the field add both color and urgency to an audiobook that deserves a better delivery. D.B. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170794959
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/11/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	963,291

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