Fascinating and compassionate ... He also does an admirable job of detailing the ways that highways and freeways divide our cities along racial lines ... It’s rare for a work so focused on wildlife conservation to also treat race.
Lively ... Mr. Goldfarb goes into the field with a number of practitioners, whom he captures in wry strokes punctuated by excellent quotations ... Perceptive ... Well-paced and vivid, an engaging account of a potentially dull subject, but it is sprinkled with strained flourishes ... Sensible.
A powerhouse of a book, a comprehensive and engaging study of the many ways that roads damage natural habitats ... Goldfarb delivers this stark assessment in a voice that’s engaging ... Tells the stories of men and women who are working to make our roads a little less deadly by tracking and aiding animal migrations.
Goldfarb writes early on that Crossings is "about how we escape" from this trap, a promise I clung to throughout the book ... However, the hoped-for map turned out to be more like a trail of breadcrumbs. The author’s skill as a storyteller, the inspiring road ecologists he meets, and the flashes of successful mitigations could not mask the predominantly grim subject matter.
Swallows, butterflies, vultures, cougars, and wombats take center stage in the drama of road ecology, the decades-long project of engineers, planners, scientists, and citizens to mitigate animal-car encounters ... Goldfarb is conscious of his participation in the violence his book documents: he drives, flies, fishes, and otherwise immerses himself in our death-dealing human infrastructure. While illuminating how each of us engages in the carnage and can make small choices to mitigate it, Crossings shows that real solutions lie beyond individual behavior. One driver can no more protect animal life than “swapping out light bulbs will solve climate change.” Everyone is a road killer until we collectively resolve to do otherwise through more conscious and protective public works ... Crossings discloses as it disturbs, refreshing our travel-weary eyes to the spaces we share with others, and the possibility of sharing better.
