Sunday book review – Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds by Barbara Allen

 

This book brings together a selection of extinct species, many that have been pushed to global extinction in living memory or at least recently enough to have touched human culture, and tells their stories. In some cases they are given a voice to tell their own stories. It’s a compilation of 30 species (or a few subspecies) with a leaning towards vertebrates and North American species. So here we re-read about the Great Auk, Eskimo Curlew, Passenger Pigeon, Ivory-billed Woodpecker and Carolina Parakeet as well as Quagga, Tarpan, Thylacine, Golden Toad and The Aurochs.

The device of writing parts of these accounts in the first person singular or plural didn’t completely work for me as the species all seemed to have much the same ‘voice’.

I’m interested in extinction and enjoyed this gallop through these examples. I learned something about the extinct St Helena Earwig which was last seen in May 1967 and was a giant of its kind. It’s not entirely clear to me why this species departed the planet except that introduced species and habitat destruction in its tiny world range were probably aiding and abetting each other to do it in. The author rightly says that few tears were shed over the passing of a very large earwig, and although she admits to shedding tears while writing this book, most of these species disappeared without being much mourned or missed and, honestly, now they are gone nobody misses them at all unless prompted by a question about whether they’d rather the Dodo were still alive.

Extinct species slip from our collective memories unless books such as this one bring them back to our attention and make us wonder whether our species could have done better.

The cover? Well it’s quite clever if you recognise that it’s based on the Audubon plate of two Passenger Pigeons in his The Birds of America with the birds themselves blanked out. I’d give the cover 7/10.

Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: stories of extinction by Barbara Allen is published by Reaktion Books

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Buy direct from Blackwell’s – a proper bookshop (and I’ll get a little bit of money from them)

www.blackwells.co.uk

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