Capsule Reviews

The Sixth Extinction, Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love, Ha! The Science of When we Laugh and Why, and Ten Thousand Birds

Written byBob Grant

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By Elizabeth Kolbert
Henry Holt, February 2014

The history of life on Earth has been punctuated by mass extinctions. Over the past half billion years, five of these extinction events have changed the complexion of our planet’s biosphere. We are in the midst of the sixth right now, according to accomplished science writer Elizabeth Kolbert. And this time, it is not an ice age or an asteroid rocketing toward Earth that serves as the cataclysm driving countless species (some yet to be discovered by science) to their untimely ends—it is humanity.

In The Sixth Extinction Kolbert trains her focus on the upheaval at hand, exploring extinctions past, present, and future through a series of portraits, some of species long since interred in the dust of ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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