A review by honnari_hannya
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

3.0

I'm not quite sure why I put this down the first time, but decided to give it a second chance with mixed results. While I do appreciate the very close look Kolbert took with regards to a few select species and their fate in the ongoing "Sixth Extinction" event that is happening in the Anthropocene, I do think that it ended up feeling quite myopic because she did not contextualize it in the scope of the larger event. I wish she had traced the throughline of human impact on the world a little more broadly toward the end, which she did all too briefly, as well as framed this Sixth Extinction within the history of the first five a little more thoroughly and explicitly. I walked away from this book knowing about bits and piece of the Sixth Extinction, some specific species and landscapes that it has ravaged, but not really a good idea of the "history" of extinction events as a whole.