Summer Reading List: The Sixth Extinction

The UC Berkeley Summer Reading List is an annual compilation of recommended (though not required) readings suggested by Cal faculty, staff, and students as a welcome to incoming freshmen and transfer students.

This week we take a closer look at The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014.

“Are we going the way of the dinosaurs? Selected as one of The New York Times Best Books of the Year for 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History explores this question by bringing science to life with engaging personal stories and interviews and cool biological facts. Kolbert makes very distant history fascinatingly relevant and real. Not only does Kolbert compel readers with the urgency of our situation, she also tells a story of how ideas, specifically the ideas of extinction and evolution, are born – a story of how knowledge itself, in all its messiness, is created.”

—KIM FREEMAN, Lecturer, College Writing Programs

This post was contributed by Michael Larkin Lecturer, College Writing Programs

Tim Dilworth First Year Coordinator, Library

Jonathan Garrett Site designer, Doe & Moffitt Libraries