RaveScheerost\"If you’re up for being shaken into fuller awareness about our endangered world...there are few more competent or companionable guides. Kolbert’s conversational prose draws readers across earth’s land, waters and air, animating a prismatic what’s-what of human follies and their unintended consequences. Metaphor, mythology, and literary references often frame the science, underlining life’s beautiful essences under threat. She mines past and present debacles due to ignorance or arrogance, and finesses a remarkable amount of detail and background into her text ... One of Kolbert’s talents is bringing clarity to complex systems. Her coverage of how the Mississippi River affects New Orleans amounts to one of the clearest explanations I’ve seen of why drainage systems and levees, built to redirect or contain water, have proved to be temporary—or a failure if you look at the long-range damage ... When people demanded of this scientist, Phil Pister, \'What good are pupfish?\' his answer-as-question was always the same: \'What good are you?\' Like Kolbert’s style, it’s a wry and piercing reply. It’s also a question many of us fail to ask.
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