RaveThe Chicago TribuneTraversing four continents and animating scientists both living and long dead, Kolbert\'s narrative can be mesmerizing and awe-inspiring. It\'s also a bit terrifying. As evidence of our role in the current mass extinction event mounts, Kolbert illuminates this scientific mystery with a mix of history and field reporting. She weaves together the story of biological calamity, from the concept\'s first articulation in revolutionary France to the front lines of numerous extinctions today. Tellingly, these stories traverse land and sea, from remote Oceania to the author\'s own backyard ... It\'s not exactly a whodunit, although the Homo sapiens we find behind the trigger of our current mass extinction event is unfamiliar. Sort of like the portrait you get of someone by only looking at their trash. It\'s not how we like to see ourselves, but maybe this mirror is more honest ... Kolbert draws out the humor and the heroism of the great lengths some conservationists take to preserve endangered species; can we both praise and pity the scientists who administer ultrasounds elbow-deep in a Sumatran rhino\'s rectum, or manually coax DNA from captive Hawaiian crows? But she does not spend much time expounding on whether they represent a real way out of the existential crisis we\'ve created for wildlife around the world ... Kolbert is reluctant to offer the promise of an escape. The real revelation of The Sixth Extinction is much darker ... Maybe we have always been out of harmony with nature. In this context we start to see humanity as an aberration.
