This is sixty-six million years of American animals in one book. Flores starts after the asteroid that killed the dinos and works forward — the strange menagerie that evolved, then the arrival of humans and the extinction of mammoths, horses, camels, lions, and the giant sloths, then the market slaughter of the 1800s that took bison, beaver, wolves, and passenger pigeons down inside a lifetime. He’s clear-eyed and doesn’t flatten anybody into innocence. The last stretch is recovery — how much has come back since the 1970s — and he treats that as the most interesting part of the story rather than a consolation.
Wild New World