Book Review with a Side of Hyperbole, Please . . .

If you're only going to read one book this year, it should be War and Peace, but if you're going to read two books this year, then the other one should be Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History; while the message is grim, the writing is clear and engaging, and Kolbert narrates her own adventures in places as far-flung and varied as the Amazon, the Andes, the Great Barrier Reef, Italy, Vermont, and a littered fossil-filled stream in an undisclosed location near a ball field in the vicinity of Princeton, New Jersey to provide a counterpoint to some shockingly depressing lessons and predictions, and while I shouldn't be doing this, because you must read this book, I will provide a thumb-nail sketch of the content . . . before humans, there were five major extinctions, and "as in Tolstoy, every extinction event appears to be unhappy-- and fatally so-- in its own way"; there was the well-documented K-Pg extinction event (formerly known as the K-T extinction event) which wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago, when a huge asteroid hit the earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, but the four other extinction events are more mysterious . . . they may have been because of climate change, shifting continents, habitat loss, and/or ocean acidification (global warming's "equally evil twin") and Kolbert wants to welcome us to the sixth extinction event, the Anthropocene, where all of these forces -- cranked up to a much faster velocity-- are wiping out species faster than we can count them, and there is an apt comparison deep in the book, after Kolbert recounts the story of the brown tree snake, an invasive species that has voraciously eaten every indigenous bird, mammal, and reptile on the island of Guam, and she cites the great nature writer David Quammen for this analogy: "while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it's just amoral and in the wrong place . . . what Boiga irregularis has done in Guam is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeed extravagantly at the expense of other species."

Are You Reading It Yet?

I'm sure, due to all my hyperbole and ultimatums,  you are well into Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, but if you haven't finished, don't get discouraged, as the book has a slightly upbeat ending-- though the evidence is nearly incontrovertible that not only are we inadvertently killing off species at a unprecedentedly rapid rate -- with climate change, ocean acidification, and a reshuffling of native and invasive species -- but there was probably no time in the Anthropocene when humanity was "one with nature,"as the "pulse" of colonization of primitive people's across the globe went hand in hand with a devastating loss of super-awesome mega-fauna -- nothing makes more more melancholy than the list of animals early North American natives hunted to to extinction (glyptodonts, cave bears, dire wolves, wooly mammoths and rhinoceros, giants beavers, giant sloths, giant camels and llamas, American lions, American cheetahs, etc. etc.) . . . and not only that but we also wiped out our main humanoid competition, the neanderthals, but due to the "leaky-replacement hypothesis" and some very adventurous swinging souls, the good news is that present day homo sapiens posses 1-4 % neanderthal genes -- so the neanderthals aren't totally extinct, they survive inside of us . . . and while there may be no way to stop this sixth extinction, Kolbert admires the folks that are trying, as these are the kind of people who will "give a Hawaiian crow a hand-job," stick their arm up a Sumatran rhinos anus, and cryogenically freeze and preserve the genes of many species just in case we can resurrect them in the future . . . but it all may be too little, too late, but perhaps next time around, in a few million years when creatures have had a chance to evolve diversely once again -- if we are still in the picture-- we will do a better job of it.

People Ruin Everything

More from The Best American Science Writing of 2010: Elizabeth Kolbert, in her essay "The Sixth Extinction?" points out that whenever people come to town, all the cool creatures are wiped out; the mastodons, mammoths, giant beavers, dire wolves, short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, toxodons, and saber tooth tigers died out just after we came to the Americas . . . the giant wombats, giant tortoises (as big as a VW Beetle!) and giant ten foot tall kangaroos died out soon after we colonized to Australia; this pattern holds true for New Zealand, Hawaii, and pretty much everywhere else-- the big and cool looking stuff can't survive in the places we colonize, but this is happening with smaller creatures as well-- there is a great die off of amphibians happening right now, notably the Colombian golden frog (which is technically a toad) and bat populations are also rapidly declining-- and Kolbert explains (and demonstrates) that this is probably caused by a chytrid fungus spread by humanity called Bd (actually it's called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, but by the time you finish saying that, another species has gone extinct) but, luckily, some species are not affected, including the hardy salamanders that we discovered in the woods near the litter strewn banks of the polluted Raritan River, but it does make me worry that we might have to stop visiting our "Jersey tough" amphibians.

Dave Should Be a Future Leader (According to Obama)

I was pleased to learn that Hillary Clinton agreed with me on the importance of Robert D. Putnam's new book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, but President Obama trumps her with his reading list for future leaders . . . I've read four of the ten:

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert;

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman;

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo;

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari;

and these were definitely some of the best books of the past decade (read my reviews if you're in need of some hyperbole) and so Obama either really loves to read, or he reads my blog and respects my reviews, or perhaps he's got really good reading advisers-- it's probably a combination of the three-- and I realize that this is a political "signal" to release this list, as it indicates that the President values high quality non-fiction, just as Donald Trump could never admit that reading books is necessary, as it would alienate his constituency and mark him as an elitist intellectual communist, which is why he gets his information from "the shows."

Due to Extinction, There Will Be No April Fool's Post This Year

I haven't gotten much response indicating that all the people out there in the human race are obeying my command to read Elizabeth Kolbert's book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and so I am canceling today's April Fool's sentence due to mass extinction (caused by humanity) and there will be no more April Fooling on this blog until the Anthropocene ends, the human race fades away, and the rats and cockroaches explode into all the available evolutionary niches, ushering in a new age of very gross bio-diversity that we will not be around to name (but you can enjoy previous April Fool's posts, as I'm not so hardhearted as to remove those . . . it's not like we wanted to kill all these creatures, right?)