Wild new world The epic story of animals and people in America

Award-winning historian Flores (Coyote America, 2016) has produced another terrific book about the wildlife of North America. Diving into deep time, his exploration begins in the Pleistocene epoch, during which newly arrived humans met the megafauna on their new terrain. Flores launches this blend of natural and human history with a discovery made by a Black cowboy in 1908: a mass of fossilized bison, one of which was later found to have a flint point embedded in its rib. Flores then tells the story of how carnivorous humans followed their prey out of Africa, arriving at last in the Western Hemisphere with its bountiful animal populations. What unfolds is a tale of wonder at what was and the pathos of extinction, both ancient and current. Flores writes beautifully of how geology shaped the landscape, of the impact of the spread of humans across the land during the Ice Age and the possibility that these early groups caused mass extinctions, of the new balance between humans and the rest of nature as Native Americans established nations north and south, and the violent changes and losses delivered by European colonizers and industrialization. Enlivened throughout with Flores' own adventures and many photographs, this is an outstanding and invaluable work of popular science.

Flores (emeritus, Western history, Univ. of Montana; Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History) draws on many scientific and social disciplines to paint a devastating portrait of humans as precipitating agents of the current "sixth extinction." Flores's exploration ranges from when humans initially migrated into North America to the depressingly familiar materialism and human exceptionalism that has shaped, if not driven, most U.S. approaches to the natural world from the 1700s to today. The extraordinary success of humans as animals--classic bipedal carnivorous hunters--sets the stage for this ambitious exploration of the eons-long relationship between people and American wildlife. The result is a fascinating, if occasionally overly dense, narrative that drives home the perilous cost of erasing humankind's animal identity or ignoring the complexity that is animal existence. Listeners are neither hampered nor aided by Clark Cornell's narration, which is consistently serviceable but never compelling, a fact that leaves the content to do most of the convincing alone. VERDICT An important, if dryly narrated, account of humans as accidental and purposeful animals of environmental extinction. Recommended for fans of environmental histories and scholars of the same.--Robin Chin Roemer