PositiveThe Washington PostThis well-researched book is an enlightening if somewhat rambling survey of how our treatment of animals has changed over the past century and a half.
Keith Seifert
PositiveWashington Post...fungi live in harmony with the ecosystems that they help keep in balance...But that balance is being disturbed...With climate change, fungal tree diseases spread by bark beetles are destroying conifer forests throughout North America...Fungal rusts and smuts that are proliferating in our increasingly warmer and wetter world endanger the world’s coffee supply...Seven out of the nine major crop diseases that threaten our food supply are fungal...Despite their destructive potential, fungi have a generous knack for working cooperatively with other organisms...Their best-known symbiotic partnership is with lichen, in which algae produce food for fungi through photosynthesis, and the fungi knit the algae together into a composite organism whose most important ecological function is breaking rocks down to create new soil...The author credits these humble organisms with the capacity to spark a revolution in the way that humans relate to nature...Technology is often seen as being opposed to the natural order...But the burgeoning field of \'mycotechnology\' points to a future in which we will learn to work together with the natural world rather than against it...\'Look to the fungi. Learn from their ways,\' Seifert urges...The book is fact-heavy but lacking in the kind of entertaining anecdotes and asides that might make for easier reading...It also jumps from topic to topic without exploring anything in much depth...These are less flaws than the nature of the task that Seifert has set for himself — to provide an encyclopedic survey of the field.
John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy
RaveThe Washington Post... an eloquent and fact-filled refutation to the Reagans of the world who see untamed nature as a blank space on the map that cries out to be developed for human uses ... To their credit, Reid and Lovejoy don’t limit themselves to making these utilitarian arguments for forest preservation, which are persuasive but a bit dry. They intersperse the science with accounts of what forests have traditionally meant to the peoples who live in them ... or all its scholarly precision, is ultimately an impassioned plea to save the world’s last great wild places by two men who had come, through long professional acquaintance, to love them. Readers will find their passion to be contagious.
Dan Saladino
RaveThe Christian Science MonitorAt a time when many of us are staying closer to home, it is exhilarating to join the author on a pilgrimage to some of the last strongholds of traditional food culture. The book is an immensely readable compendium of food history, cultural lore, agricultural science, and travelogue. There are new flavors to imagine and places to visit on every page ... Saladino is not suggesting that we should go back to the diets of the past. But he does say we can learn from our forebears that food is more than just a commodity. It is ultimately a connection to the earth. Eating to Extinction is a plea to become more mindful of this inestimable gift.
Bartow J Elmore
PositiveWashington PostThe history is well documented here, but familiar. What the author adds is historical context which demonstrates that the Roundup debacle was part of a larger pattern of unleashing half-baked chemical solutions to problems — solutions which, all too frequently, created even bigger problems down the line ... Elmore paints a damning portrait of a corporation that was slow to investigate the dangers of the chemicals it sold and attempted to discredit the work of the scientists who had the temerity to reveal those dangers ... While he pulls no punches in telling this quintessential story of the results of corporate hubris, Elmore resists the temptation to make it a morality tale with clear-cut villains ... The author’s point is not that genetic engineering is evil, as some of its critics contend, or even that it doesn’t work. In the right hands, Elmore says, new genetic tools such as Crispr gene editing might indeed help generate something like the agricultural revolution that Monsanto promised, but never delivered ... That may be true. Still, one wonders if a corporate system that sees no higher value than increasing quarterly earnings can be trusted with our food future.
Suzanne Simard
PositiveThe Christian Science Monitor... a frequently lyrical memoir which puts [Simard\'s] work in the context of her lifelong fascination with the forest, and her growing alarm over the massive clearcuts that are transforming the region into a blighted checkerboard ... This personal narrative reminds us that science is a human enterprise – and, in Simard’s case at least, as much a product of the heart as of the head ... The author’s urgent call at the end of the book to preserve our remaining old-growth forest lands could not be more timely.
Bill Gates
PositiveThe Christian Science Monitor... this is a surprisingly good read. The author’s enthusiasm and curiosity about the way things work is infectious. He walks us through not just the basic science of global warming, but all the ways that our modern lives contribute to it. He offers a primer on farming; transportation; food waste; and concrete, steel, and plastic manufacturing, to name some of the author’s encyclopedic range of concerns ... Gates never questions the assumption that we need to continue to grow the economy and even substantially increase energy use, especially in the developing world. Some will see this as the book’s blind spot. It takes for granted that the environment can be saved without a change in lifestyle and material aspirations, especially in the developed world. ... Climate change, as the author convincingly argues, is the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced.
Andrea Pitzer
PositiveThe Christian Science MonitorThe monotony of their lives—punctuated by moments of terror—is chillingly told ... It’s a darkly fascinating tale about a venture that appears today—and must have seemed to many at the time—sheer folly ... Neither de Veer nor the author probes deeply into the motives of the crew members, nor of Barents himself, who remains an oddly opaque figure throughout the book ... readers can vicariously experience what it would be like to push themselves to their physical and psychological limits. And they can wonder about how they would fare in similar circumstances ... This is not a book for the squeamish. Pitzer’s prose is beautifully wrought, but unrelenting. Yet it is ultimately hopeful—not just because the survivors stage an astonishing escape, but because we watch them struggle together right up to death’s door to achieve it. Theirs is a tale of good triumphing in extremis.
Rebecca Giggs
PositiveThe Washington PostLyrical ... Facts like these are eye-opening. But the book shines most brightly in its poetry ... Giggs’s writing has an old-fashioned lushness and elaborateness of thought. Still, all that rich language and the author’s meandering philosophical reflections on subjects from parasites to the history of taxonomy can make for slow reading and seem at times to be diversions from the main subject. Also, Giggs focuses too much, for my tastes, on the dying and decomposition of whales and not enough on describing living animals. I wanted more stories about how whales interact with one another and with us ... This is not the book for those kinds of anecdotes. But its finest passages — and they are many — awaken a sense of wonder. That other lives as marvelous and mysterious as these still exist is, for the moment at least, a reason to celebrate.
