Obviously this isn't what you'd call a cheerful book. It looks at the major extinctions on earth through time, including the major one we're living through now, where we're losing species every day. But I didn't find it depressing. Strange as it sounds, there's something just amazing about how the earth has been essentially shaken like an etch-o-sketch and had to start again almost from scratch.

Not so pleasant to be so aware that we're shaking our own Etch-o-Sketch now ourselves, and could quite possibly wipe ourselves out in doing it. Man, the book suggests with good evidence, has just never been able to live in harmony with nature even at the times in history and in cultures we look back on now and think was all about harmony with nature.

As a book, it was very engaging and exciting with plenty of interesting characters both human and non-human.