RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewDunn sketches an arresting vision of this relentless natural world — a world that is in equal measures creative, unguided and extravagant ... Along this unsettling journey into the future, the mood is leavened here and there by oddities, which Dunn dusts off like the docent of a strange natural history museum ... The impression all this arcana leaves with the reader is that we live in a much weirder, more disorienting world than we tend to appreciate ... Dunn’s account leaves an overwhelming impression of fecundity, growth, adaptation. But this isn’t a naïvely rosy vision of the future like some contrarian tracts on the resilience of nature in the Anthropocene. From a human perspective this will be an impoverished world, and many of Dunn’s warnings are concrete and sobering. But readers are left to draw many of the connections for themselves — and as the anecdotes and factoids pile up, they begin to take on a koan-like quality.
Paige Williams
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe life of a globe-trotting dinosaur smuggler might bring to mind Thomas Crown meets Tintin, but one of the revelations of the book is just how mundane the skulduggery of Prokopi’s crime actually was ... The strange underground world Prokopi inhabits inevitably brings us in contact with some serious oddballs, each of whom is introduced by Williams with the economy and evocative precision of a haiku. In affectless, purposeful prose we get a stream of increasingly strange and piquant factoids about these people, who seem to emerge straight out of a Coen brothers movie ... Williams so skillfully conceals the sausage-making of reporting that when we’re told, for instance, what someone was thinking while urinating in the desert in the middle of the night several years ago, we accept it as truth.
