Title: The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions

Author: Peter Brannen

Publisher: Ecco 2018

Genre: Nonfiction - Science

Pages: 336

Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Winter TBR

Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth’s past dead ends, and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our possible future.

Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the twenty-first century have analogs in these five extinctions. Using the visible clues these devastations have left behind in the fossil record, The Ends of the World takes us inside “scenes of the crime,” from South Africa to the New York Palisades, to tell the story of each extinction. Brannen examines the fossil record—which is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fish—and introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who, using the forensic tools of modern science, are piecing together what really happened at the crime scenes of the Earth’s biggest whodunits.

Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes us on a tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light.

Caveat: This is not a bad good even with my star rating, it just wasn’t the book for me personally. I find that many of these more general history books are fairly boring to me as I know a little too much about history. In this case, I have read so many history and specifically pre-history and extinction event books that this one was a lot of repetitive information. I enjoyed the book, but end up skimming a ton of the chapters. Good info, just not for me.

Next up on the TBR pile: