The Sixth Extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, is a clear-eyed, devastating, and surprisingly readable account of what scientists increasingly call the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. The previous five were driven by asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, and shifts in the planet's chemistry. This one is being driven by us. Drawing on field reporting from the Great Barrier Reef, the Andes, the Amazon, and a sealed cave in Vermont, Kolbert tells the story through the species being lost in real time. Frogs whose skin can no longer fight off a fungus humans carried around the world. Bats wiped out by white-nose syndrome in a single generation. Corals bleached by oceans that have absorbed a quarter of every ton of carbon dioxide we have ever burned. The sumatran rhino, the great auk, ammonites long since vanished from the fossil record. Kolbert weaves natural history, biographical sketches of the scientists doing the work, and the long history of how the very idea of extinction was first conceived, into a narrative that is mournful but never resigned. The book has become a foundational text for understanding the age our species has put its name on: the Anthropocene.
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New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert argues humans are driving Earth through a mass extinction on the scale of the five before it. Across thirteen field chapters she follows a Panamanian frog die-off, a vanishing Atlantic auk, a melting Great Barrier Reef, and the last bones of Neanderthals.
Yes. The Sixth Extinction won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Elizabeth Kolbert is also the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe and Under a White Sky.
Yes. Elizabeth Kolbert is a New Yorker staff writer with extensive science journalism credentials. The Sixth Extinction draws on contemporary research in paleontology, biology, and climate science. The framing of a current human-caused mass extinction is widely accepted in mainstream science.
The Sixth Extinction was written by Elizabeth Kolbert, published in 2014 by Macmillan USA.
The Sixth Extinction is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Sixth Extinction takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Sixth Extinction is a standalone novel by Elizabeth Kolbert, not part of a series.
The Sixth Extinction is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
