An important work that combines intellectual history and natural history with reporting on the field to give us an accurate picture of the mass extinction unfolding right before our eyes. The diversity of life on earth abruptly and dramatically decreased five times over the last half a billion years.

The sixth extinction is now being monitored around the world by researchers. This is predicted to be the most devastating event since the asteroid impact which wiped out the dinosaurs. However, this time it is humans who are responsible for the disaster.

A decade’s worth of research from Elizabeth draws on dozens of disciplines, as she goes on field trips with many of them: geologists studying deep ocean cores, botanists following the tree line up the Andes, marine biologists diving off the Great Barrier Reef. The Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino are among the species she introduces, some extinct already and others in danger of disappearing.

In these stories, Kolbert traces the origins of the concept of extinction, first articulated in revolutionary Paris by the scientist Georges Cuvier through to the present day, through a moving account of disappearances. Kolbert observes that humanity’s sixth extinction will likely be its most lasting legacy; it forces us to rethink our defining characteristics as humans.

How else could we explain our inability to imagine a better future in the face of global warming if we were not deranged? This is the question raised by renowned Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh.

Ghosh examines the human inability to comprehend the scale and violence of climate change in his first nonfiction work since In an Antique Land. He claims that today’s extreme weather patterns are incapable of accommodating contemporary modes of thinking and imagining because of their extreme nature. In serious literary fiction, such improbability feels especially inapplicable: tornadoes and hundred-year storms are automatically relegated to other genres when they occur.

Several gross simplifications have been made in the writing of history as well; as Ghosh demonstrates, the history of the carbon economy is a tangled, contradictory, and counterintuitive one. To limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes with a price, as Ghosh explains. In much the same way, he argues, politics has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than collective action. He argues that fiction is better suited to the task of imagining alternative worlds than any other type of culture. His book serves as a call to action for the greatest writer of our time.