The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Elizabeth Kolbert · 2014
Kolbert spent years visiting extinction sites around the world (coral reefs, the Amazon, Hawaiian mountain ridges) and documented the sixth mass extinction currently underway, caused by humans. Accessible, devastating, and impossible to dismiss. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.
The case against
Structurally it is one formula repeated across thirteen chapters: fly to a site, meet a scientist, watch a species or ecosystem fail, register the dread, move on. It works chapter by chapter and wears thin over the whole. Assembled largely from magazine reporting, the book runs long on documented loss and short on what anyone might do about it, which leaves you informed, grim, and without a handhold.
Non-Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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