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In Larchmont: Meet New York Times Bestselling Author, Elizabeth Kolbert

The Friends of the Larchmont Public Library present New York Times bestselling author, Elizabeth Kolbert, reading from The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt & Co, February 2014), a major new book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes. The event will take place on Saturday, May 3, at 4:00pm, in the Larchmont Village Center located directly behind the Larchmont Public Library. Refreshments will be available beginning at 3:30pm and the reading is free.

 

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Her series on global warming, The Climate of Man, from which the book was adapted, won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award and a National Academies communications award. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner. She is also a recipient of a Heinz Award and Guggenheim Fellowship. A former resident of Larchmont, Kolbert now lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award, writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, and others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

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Praise for Elizabeth Kolbert and THE SIXTH EXTINCTION:AN UNNATURAL HISTYORY:

“Powerful... Kolbert expertly traces the ‘twisting’ intellectual history of how we’ve come to understand the concept of extinction, and more recently, how we’ve come to recognize our role in it... An invaluable contribution to our understanding of present circumstances.”  —Al Gore, The New York Times Book Review

“Arresting... Ms. Kolbert shows in these pages that she can write with elegiac poetry about the vanishing creatures of this planet, but the real power of her book resides in the hard science and historical context she delivers here, documenting the mounting losses that human beings are leaving in their wake.”  —The New York Times




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