Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America by Dan Flores

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America Reviews

• 
  Lizzie Stewart

  "The staggering losses in the first five thousand years of the Anthropocene pitted a superpredator species - us - against prey animals that either had no experience with us or whose evolutionary defenses were keyed to older dangers and were unable to protect them against our spread and efficiency. But animals confronting us over the past five centuries have faced something different. Since then we've thought of living creatures as mere resources in an economy designed to enrich us, and that has produced one ugly, depraved story after another, a history of inhumanity perpetrated by ordinary Americans in the name of freedom and the market, its cruelty and barbarism as often as not endorsed by government and sometimes even carried out by its agents. This is how we de-buffaloed, de-pigeoned, de-wolfed America."
  
  Wild New World is a heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful reflection on the relationship between human beings and other animals in America. Beginning with our early spread through the continent and moving to the present day, Flores highlights the initial extinction of megafauna hunted by our ancestors. He then moves to more recent extinctions - the result of habitat destruction, hunting, trade of animal parts, and attempts to eliminate "evil" predators. This segues into the rise of environmentalism in the 60s and ends with the reflection that, while many species will never be seen again, we have the chance to save the ones that are still here.
  
  A thoroughly researched, devastating history. Thank you so much to Dan Flores and W. W. Norton & Company for this ARC through NetGalley. Wild New World is available as of October 2022 for purchase.
• 
  Ben

  Dan Flores butchered his chance with this book. The subject matter here is so ambitious; a complete history of North American wildlife, truly from the beginning. This could have been perfect. I wanted this to be perfect so badly. This book should have been my shit. And yet I found myself slogging through chapter after chapter.
  
  There's no real coherent organization. It's roughly (with as much emphasis as possible) chronological, but bounces around so drastically from species to species, region to region. You quickly get whiplash trying to follow not only the species, but the various human characters involved in the stories of their extinction or rescue.
  
  Flores also injects himself into the story at several points. Not only are these sections tedious, they break up what little narrative he's been able to cultivate.
  
  This book is the most infuriating mix of mind-blowing facts and tidbits, interspersed with long meandering buried ledes and near-constant changes in setting. 3/5, I'd still recommend it purely for the information it holds, but jesus I'll never read a Flores book again.
• 
  Tallie

  natural history of north america! interesting read and flores does a good job at painting the picture of what our continent looked like a long time ago up until how our modern day understanding/laws around wildlife came to be. While the book title does highlight "america" flores really only talks about north america and doesn't dive too deep into south america.
• 
  Kayla Grattan

  Fascinating nonfiction portraying the evolutionary origins, pre-human abundance and post-human plunder of North America’s wildlife and wild lands. This book is spread out in a narrative journey that is easy to digest and connect with.
  
  Flores paints a picture of ancient North America that is so starkly contrasted with our modern reality. It’s jaw dropping to think about how wild it really was before the onset of the Anthropocene and European colonization.
  
  Despite the tales of loss, organized into the stories of specific beloved species, Flores incorporates elements of conservation and hope as we grapple with modern environmental challenges. This book is a powerful educational tool that encourages fierce and swift protection of the majestic and unique wildlife of North America.
• 
  Nick Buccongello

  Interesting and valuable information. Dan Flores clearly has done his home work and cares deeply about sharing his knowledge with the world. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish this book due to his writing style. Bouncing back and forth between the past and the present so often left me struggling to follow along and stay invested.
  
• 
  Tom Schulte

  This is a fascinating overview of people vs. animals (really) in the Americas from like 21,000 years ago to the 21st Century. Basically, the author makes the case that the human animal over millennia has combined a
  "henhouse syndrome," more scientifically known as surplus killing, w/biological first contact where animals do not know to fear humans to head toward extinction or near-extinction. This goes from archaeological evidence of mass killing for only a few choice cuts, which I have read about in
  Time Detectives: How Archaeologists Use Technology to Recapture the Past to the disruption caused by disease spreading in the 15th and 16th Centuries by Spanish explorers. This is interesting for the early primary sources observing animal density declines with proximity to human settlements, but returns once those human populations were decimated. This is also the first time I recall reading that
  Little Ice Age is deemed by some to have a root cause in decreased human population. The Stone Age approach to herd management was taken up by more European visitors taking out the bison herds as well as completely eradicating the great auk, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, etc. and wreaking a devastating toll on otters, wolves, etc. and through DDT birds including the national symbol. These are sad and dispiriting histories including a conspiracy theory that wiping out the "buffalo" herds was an American government conspiracy as well as the reckless abandon of the
  wolfers dispensing cyanide and strychnine causing untold collateral damage.
  
  The author grew up in Louisiana and tells much of Louisiana animals, including
  how Louisiana alligators went from threatened to thriving. The author is not as hopeful about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, dismissing all evidence brought forward through September 2021. I am saddened by the implication this includes
  the video evidence I saw on YouTube.
  
  Overall this is very educational, enlightening even. I am only somewhat disappointed in the narrator.
• 
  Janalyn Prude

  With a great narrator and an enthusiasm for animal human and fauna Daniel Flores does a great job telling a story and teaching at the same time. With every mention of a people animal or to rain tidbits and facts are given and it is so interesting. I have never read a history book executed with such A flare in original concept. I can honestly say I listen to this book from beginning to end and loved it all. The narrative flows flawlessly and you don’t even realize you’ve already gone several chapters and it doesn’t feel like it. I can’t say enough good things about this great audiobook the original execution and flawless narrative make it oh so awesome I truly loved this book and hope the author writes more like it in the future. I received this book from NetGalley and the publisher but I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.
• 
  Bridey

  2.5 stars
  
  the first part of this book about the ice age was great, i learned lots, and was interested (aside from the times when the author discusses fertility symbols in cave paintings that are drawings of the “human vagina” when i’m nearly certain he could’ve spent 30 seconds on google and learned the word he was looking for was “vulva”). i think he handled the discussion on colonialism very poorly, but i came back around and enjoyed the final chapter about the birth of the modern environmental movement. all in all, i enjoyed about half this book, hence the 2.5 stars
• 
  Patrick

  A fantastic synthesis of America’s historic and prehistoric political, economic, and cultural relationship to wildlife. Flores presents the Americas Columbus encountered as a land of relative wild bounty compared to other regions of the world — and one already impoverished and fundamentally altered at the hands of humans. A fascinating read!
• 
  Desirae

  I am a fan. The book is primarily about how the Europeans/colonists/Americans decimated the ecological balance causing the extirpation/extinction of iconic animals. The tale includes the passenger pigeon (well known) and Carolina parakeets (lesser known but equally disturbing). The narrative is filled with anecdotes and written accounts which makes the story even more poignant. Justifying wanton slaughter defies how we think today.
  
  For specifics which actually caused me to waiver between scoring a 4 or 5. I initially understood that the author's effort would cover more immediate post-Pleistocene human involvement. A few butchering sites are described, then the arrival of the Spanish. Secondly, the author provides explanations that seem to lack evidence. Page 234, Native Americans stole several dozen horses from the Spanish. Within 150 years, dozens of Indian tribes are relocating as horse-riding hunters of bison while giving up subsistent farming. Also, vast herds of wild horses are in competition for the same grass lengths as the bison.
  
  A score of 5 is my grade. One example is John Gast's painting of American Progress as a subsection intro. I thought it was a powerful use of Americana. The second is John Cook's (pg 230) fabricated story of how a secret Federal effort was in place to encourage Americans to slaughter bison as a way to starve Native Americans into submission and their eventual move to reservations. The Texas legislature, a bending bill to protect bison populations, and a speaker (Philip Sheridan) are given to establish credibility. Unfortunately, no archival evidence is found, and Sheridan died several years prior. Like other more current conspiracies, lack of evidence was not an issue that prevented its repeated use.
  
  Offering a 4 out of hundreds of gleanings from the book only illustrates the array of information a reader is exposed to in the book. The tragic story of our abuse of this land, native peoples, and the ecological balance is comprised of facts. This a story that is well written and deserving of praise for the work and its author.
• 
  Nancy Lewis

  A fascinating account of how humans have influenced the North American ecosystem since arriving here towards the end of the last ice age.
• 
  Derek Sheehan

  ”Know the heaven and earth that was, but experience the world that is.”
• 
  Richard Reese

  Dan Flores is a historian who has been studying the stormy relationship between humans and the family of life for many years. He calls this subject Big History. Wild New World is a fascinating and disturbing masterpiece. It’s a thick book loaded with ideas gathered over a long career. The core focus is on North America, which was once an Eden-like paradise of abundant wildlife. What happened?
  
  Our species emerged in beautiful Mother Africa maybe 300,000 years ago. Maybe 60,000 years ago, adventurous folks began wandering off into the outer world. Our exploration of the planet was underway. Folks went east to Asia, and north to Europe. By maybe 45,000 years ago, folks were in Siberia and northern Asia. So far, the earliest evidence of humans in America dates to maybe 25,000 years ago.
  
  Flores described two important discoveries in New Mexico. At Folsom (1908), the bones of 32 extinct giant bison, 12,450 years old. At Clovis (1914) the bones of extinct mammoths, 13,000 years old. At both sites, flaked flint points were found with the bones, smoking gun evidence of human hunting. A huge surprise!
  
  Humans were team hunters skilled at killing delicious wild animals, preferably jumbo sized megafauna. As bands of pioneers migrated into new frontiers, a number of megafauna species gradually went extinct, in one region after another, a sequence corresponding to the timeline of human arrival.
  
  Today, our culture celebrates human brilliance. We’re simply too smart to disrupt the planet’s climate — global warming is a hoax! We deny responsibility — not our fault. Similarly, we’re too smart to cause mass extinctions — not our fault.
  
  It’s much more comfortable to blame prehistoric climate change. But the wiped-out species in America had survived for millions of years, including numerous eras of unusual heat and cold. They weren’t dainty weaklings. Why did this killer climate shift only exterminate large animals, not small? Why did it just affect America, but not other continents at the same time? Hmmm…
  
  In the 1960s, Paul Martin began using a new technology, radiocarbon dating, a better tool for dating prehistoric artifacts. This enabled him to compare the dates of human presence in North America with the dates of extinctions. He learned that human arrival came first, and extinctions came later — during a process that took maybe a thousand years.
  
  Stunned, he referred to this process as “blitzkrieg overkill,” because of its unusual speed. To Native Americans, this implied that their venerable ancestors foolishly hunted too hard. They’ve never been fond of the paleface settlers who foolishly obliterated their ancient homeland, and they especially disliked Martin.
  
  We’ve now learned that as the human diaspora advanced around the world, the same pattern followed: arrival first, then extinction. By 2006, Martin had learned more. He wrote, “I argue that virtually all extinctions of wild animals in the last 50,000 years were anthropogenic.” Yikes! The indigenous white folks of Europe had done it too!
  
  Evolution had fine-tuned us for living in tropical climates. Many of the new lands we wandered into had uncomfortably chilly non-tropical climates. We were forced to develop innovative solutions, like needles, awls, sewn clothing, and protective shelters.
  
  When we arrived in new regions, the wildlife was clueless. Mysterious bipedal primates did not trigger danger alarms, because we didn’t fit the standard predator template. “We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs, and fire.” For a while, hunters enjoyed the pursuit of fearless prey, many of whom became victims of fatal tameness, like dodos. During the Lewis & Clark expedition, Clark once bayoneted a wolf that calmly walked past.
  
  Hunting focused on jumbo sized animals that didn’t breed like bunnies, or zoom like gazelles. Small groups of humans roamed across vast roadless wilderness on foot, armed with Stone Age weapons. Game was depleted over the course of centuries, and the process of decline could have been imperceptible to living generations. As game got scarce, the diaspora advanced into new regions.
  
  Everywhere we migrated, the megafauna had evolved large strong bodies, a traditional defense against fierce predators, like sabertooth cats. Unfortunately, when the predators were bloodthirsty primates from outer space, jumbo size was a vulnerability, and high speed escape was not an option. The big guys could be killed with primitive spears.
  
  America was the last major stop of the human diaspora, which had begun maybe 35,000 years earlier. During this long process, pioneers had become highly skilled survivalists. When the Beringia land bridge emerged from the sea, they advanced from Siberia into the “American Serengeti.”
  
  I was shocked to realize the very long time spans of evolutionary history prior to human arrival. The camel family in North America blinked out 10,000 years ago, ending a 40 million year residence. Horses went extinct 9,000 years ago, after enjoying four million years here. Mammoths wandered in from the Old World 1.5 million years ago. It’s heartbreaking to comprehend the impact of the blitzkrieg.
  
  IMPORTANT! So, a number of species blinked out. When the American megafauna extinction surge wound down, what came next was 10,000 years (100 centuries) of relative stability, according to Flores. The human pioneers remained, and eventually coevolved with the species that survived. This preserved the continent’s downsized wildlife community. Humans learned ecosystem limits, established wise taboos to avoid overhunting, and nurtured a culture of profound respect and reverence for the entire family of life.
  
  Species that survived extinction now had less competition. With the giant bison gone forever, the much smaller bison we know today exploded in number. They reached reproductive age faster, and successfully coevolved with the remaining survivors.
  
  Sadly, the 100 centuries of stability zoomed off a cliff 500 years ago, when visitors from the Old World began washing up on the Atlantic coast — something like a bloody asteroid strike. The aliens brought with them an assortment of deadly infectious diseases for which natives had zero immunity. There were maybe four million natives in 1492. Epidemics rapidly spread westward, killing about 90 percent of them within 100 years.
  
  This die-off sharply reduced hunting pressure on the wildlife, which was free to grow explosively. In 1585, Thomas Hariot was astonished by the fantastic abundance of animals he saw in Virginia. It was an Eden created by disease. Settlers were free to hunt like crazy in a wilderness where there were no rules or regulations.
  
  In addition to diseases, colonists also imported their infectious worldview. Their religion had roots in a herding society that treasured enslaved livestock, and detested predators. Their Old World culture was built on a foundation of human supremacy, domestication, civilization, manufacturing, fanaticism, patriarchy, environmental devastation, and pathological self-interest.
  
  From time to time, Flores stopped to take a long hard piss on the notion of self-interest, a demonic quirk in the settler’s worldview. I suspect it emerged with the rise of farming, herding, personal property, and individual salvation. Its one all-consuming question has been “how can I get what I want?” We suffer from an insatiable lifelong pursuit of social status, to the fullest extent possible, by any means necessary. Nothing else matters. Sorry kids! Sorry wolves!
  
  The traditional worldview of most tribal cultures majored in cooperation instead. It nurtured mindfulness, and profound reverence for the family of life, the mother of their existence. They were something like the folks who made the passionate cave paintings at Chauvet. With few exceptions, the named gods of Native Americans were animals — coyote, raven, rabbit, etc.
  
  In the Old World religion, humans were very special critters, the other animals were not. By and by, settlers from the Old World flooded into America. They had domesticated animals and religions and economic ideas wherein “animals were not kin but resources.” Their lives had no sacred significance. So, the more hides, pelts, and furs you could take to market, the more cool stuff you could get. Yippee!
  
  Native folks thoroughly detested the monstrous colonists, but were fascinated by the unusual stuff they had. Fifty deerskins could be traded for a metal pot. Hatchets, axes, and knives were more expensive. Whiskey was intoxicating. The desire for this stuff was powerful, but it wasn’t free.
  It was in the self-interest of the market, and the colonies, to leave nothing of monetary value unmolested. Wild animals were pests that stood in the path of progress, and their extermination would continue until it was no longer profitable. For natives, all options sucked. They struggled to do their best.
  
  In 1972, I was a roller coaster operator. Riders slowly went up the steep hill, and then rapidly zoomed downhill screaming their brains out. Flores provides readers a similar experience. Most of his book describes the terrifying mass insanity that ravaged America in the last 500 years. Readers will scream their brains out as they plunge deep into the cesspool of Big History, our horrifying monster closet.
  
  Flores wrote that the invaders forced “a transformation of a hundred centuries of Native America into a re-creation of Old World civilization on a new continent.” Five centuries ago, Old World folks and animals arrived, “and then, like some new contagion spreading inland from the coasts, proceeded to effect a widespread demolition of almost all that was here.”
  
  In one year, 1743, the port at La Rochelle, France “took in 127,000 beaver pelts, 30,300 marten furs, 12,400 river otter furs, 110,000 raccoon pelts, along with its big haul for that year, the stripped skins of 16,500 American black bears.”
  
  “In 1874 Bozeman market hunters were hip-deep in the big bonanza. That year they shipped out 48 tons of elk skins, 42 tons of deerskins, 17 tons of pronghorn skins, and 760 pounds of bighorn skins.”
  
  “Governments at all levels paid money for the heads or ears or scalps of a suite of animals — wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, grizzly and black bears, jaguars, bobcats, lynx — for the single purpose of promoting agricultural economies.” Dead animals (or meat chunks) injected with strychnine were put everywhere to poison scavengers — wolves, coyotes, eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies, foxes, skunks. It was sold in bulk in every store.
  
  To delight ranchers, Montana put out 3,567,000 poison baits to kill predators. Between 1883 and 1928 Montana shelled out payments on 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes. In one year, a wolf killer earned enough to buy a ranch and livestock.
  
  Passenger pigeons, had been in America for 15 million years. My father was in diapers when the last one died in 1914. “The largest nesting site ever reported, near Sparta, Wisconsin, in 1871, spread across 850 square miles (2,200 km2).” One flock was estimated to have 3.7 billion birds.
  
  Life on Earth is powered by energy. Sunbeams feed the plants, and plants feed the critters.
  Agriculture and herding amplified the energy flow for humans. More recently, the flow has been explosively accelerated by burning fossil hydrocarbons, which are not limitless or harmless. We can now temporarily feed more than eight billion. We’re heating the planet into a toasty concentration camp crematory. The machine’s guiding force is insanely clever childish self-interest, which is dumber than dog shit, but far more powerful than foresight, wisdom, cooperation, and mindful self-control. SCREAM!!!
• 
  Joanne Manaster

  Epic, indeed! A comprehensive history of wildlife of the new world and those who nearly obliterated many of them as the Americas were seen merely as valuable for its resources. Excellent read. Very informative.
• 
  Chantal Lyons

  'Wild New World' is meticulously researched and detailed - and a soul-harrowing experience for it. You need to have a certain mental stamina to cope with listening to this unflinching history of the destruction of biodiversity in North America (and, of course, of cultures and indigenous peoples living there). The audiobook can essentially be boiled down to "This species? Dead. This other species? Dead. And this species? ALSO DEAD". I wanted to punch my fist through a wall during the section on the Ivory Billed Woodpecker.
  
  Very little in this audiobook surprised me, though I appreciated learning more about perhaps more neglected species such as the pronghorn, and the twisting evolutionary history of the horse. That said, the bulk of the book focuses on what happened when Europeans arrived in North America, and I would've loved to linger more in the Pleistocene and pre-Colonial time periods.
  
  Flores' prose is compelling, and he shares snippets of personal experience where relevant, which I appreciated. It isn't exactly mind-blowing, but it does draw together a great deal of up-to-date knowledge about evolution and history in the context of North America. Recommended.
  
  (With thanks to HighBridge Audio and NetGalley for this audiobook in exchange for an honest review)
• 
  Ma'Belle

  Overall this was a pretty well-told book of popular eco-science: both ecologies and economies. It is mostly an examination of humans' effects on land mammal and bird populations throughout history and prehistory. Almost no attention is paid to aquatic life in the Americas or the almost unfathomable decreases in insect populations over the past 50 years, except when referencing Rachel Carson's landmark book Silent Spring.
  
  I wasn't impressed by some of the speculative claims Flores makes, such as the awareness prehistoric humans may or may not have had that the herd sizes of large "game" animals was drastically lower than it had been a few thousand years earlier. I believe it was in The Sixth Extinction that I recently read another account of extinctions caused by humans expanding in geographic location and population, and that author specifically pointed out that it wouldn't have been obvious at all to the many generations that passed as animals like mammoths and mastodons went from being abundant to scarce.
  
  Here are a few things that were new and interesting to me, or that I noticed and was bothered by while listening to the audiobook.
  
  Newish DNA evidence has uncovered a lot of revelations about prehistoric life in the Americas. Apparently some kind of *horses* and *sheep* were here LOOOOONG before the bison/American buffalo, despite the latter later becoming iconic to North America and the pervasive teaching that there were no horses or sheep (Dine’ creation story-related!) until the Spanish brought them.
  
  English settlers had never known wolves in their lives until coming to America because they’d killed them all off in England in the 1400s! They dreamed of an America without wolves.
  
  When 50+ million Native Americans, reliant on fire economies/ecologies, died in a short timespan called the “American disease holocaust,” it may have caused what is known as the Little Ice Age from ~1550-1850 .
  
  The narrator mispronounces Navajo and Dine’ *back to back*! (putting the emphasis accent on the second “a” and a long accent on the “i” respectively)
• 
  Buck Wilde

  Dan the Man Flores gives a thorough rundown of the timeline and development, to the best of our perpetually limited knowledge, of American fauna, gradually working himself into a fever pitch about how humans ruined everything, increasing the degree by which we ruined everything by one more standard deviations per Sid Meier's Civilization-type epoch.
  
  The Americas, like Australia and everywhere else, probably, was once home to a biodiverse panoply of beautiful, incredibly stupid megafauna. When humans hit any of these respective scenes, they quickly learned you could walk right up to these huge, affable, doddering animals - the prehistoric equivalent of the Grimace - and stab it straight in the brain. The concept of predation was so foreign to many of them that if you stand still and hold the knife out, the animals would leap directly on the knife. So went the Dodo, so went the Megalonyx (American giant ground sloth), so went the Glytodonts (massive herbivorous armadillos), so went a whole bunch of species that we never got to see.
  
  And that was back before the guns and steel, when all we had was germs! We were the avenging angels of death, the bloodthirsty ogres, the Michaels Myers of the Pleistocene when all we brought to the fight were rocks and sticks.
  
  As technology progressed, so did our appetite for wiping out entire species. Guns really turned things around. We know how the buffalo debacle happened, even the American public school system couldn't spin that one. Flores gets himself real angry as he explains just how shitty and terrible it was, with self-proclaimed yeehaw buckaroos and mountain men deciding to potshot buffalo from the back of moving trains just for the hell of it. It's boggling to imagine how cheap ammunition must have been back then.
  
  Much of the drive to the Americas in the first place was how animals = profit, in meat, in skins, in fur, and hunting was a luxury reserved for the nobility back in Europe. Poaching laws forbade poor people from eating pretty much anything except bread and potatoes, which is why everyone in Western Europe is 5'0" and why Br*tish teeth look like that. The opportunity to slaughter animals en masse not only provided reprieve from entire bloodlines worth of deep-seated generational peasant trauma, but also let the newly minted Americans sell their parts for an endlessly renewing supply of filthy lucre like a low-level MMORPG character.
  
  A few ill-known naturalists and Teddy Roosevelt later, we have animal protection laws that everyone ignores and a celebrated history of murdering game wardens. Up until very recently, predators could not count toward "animals included in nature", as we somehow believed that predators existing as they had since the dawn of time would disrupt the balance of prey species, leading to fewer things for us to kill for fun, and forcing us to eat wolves. We resolved this by poisoning everything.
  
  Strychnine was the name of the game for a while, and these intrepid heroes of the wild American frontier would shoot a big, delicious animal, like a buffalo, then stuff it with strychnine. This would poison the varmints that we considered unfavorable, like wolves, coyotes, and all sorts of big cats, as well as literally everything else omnivorous because that's how nature works. So we've got piles of dead condors 100 deep, dropping dead into the same field from mid-flight like a spilled handful of Skittles. We've got a sudden explosion in disease-carrying insects like ticks because you government-payroll wildlife management brainiacs killed all the opossums and foxes with the worst poison your Davey Crockett/Oppenheimer fusion could come up with. And, surprise! A sudden subsequent explosion in disease that comes home to you.
  
  Your tax dollars at work, folks.
  
  And this just turned around circa the 90s. They were out there shooting wolves from helicopters to make sure Yellowstone stayed extra special pretty for the tourists.
  
  Well, Flores must have made a good argument for it, because I'm mad now too. An excellent book for anybody who cares about evolution, conservation, or anthropology.
• 
  Linda Brunner

  Every once in a while, I run into a book and an author that resonates at the deepest level. So goes it with Dan Flores and his writings. A fellow lover of the natural world if I ever read one.
  
  This my second of his books, both as harrowing and inspiring as the first which focuses on coyotes one of my favorite most mysterious and clever of our fellow creatures.
  
  Wild New World is about our history with our animal brothers and sisters. And it's not a pretty story, infuriating and depressing both most of the time. We have typically been a self absorbed and badly behaved neighbor on this lovely green earth. At the end of the book, a bit of hope and a reminder to inform yourself and be present here now with all the beauty we have left.
  
  From the book: "We are know that in 1776 Thomas Jefferson did NOT write: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all species are created equal." Not withstanding Carolus Linnaeus classifying humans as animals, or Native American instincts about our kinship with other creatures, the idea that all species were on a level playing field was manifestly NOT self-evident at the founding of the United States. Nonetheless, in the past half century--and to some extent led by the United States--people around the world began to dedicate themselves to an idea at least as radical as universal suffrage. We accorded the right, by law and policy, for existing species to remain alive beside us.
  This principal may be off the radar for most people, in part because its thrust is largely about others. But make no mistake: protecting other species from going extinct, and devising imaginative ways to help them recover when they're threatened, is a titanic development in American cultural life."
  
  And may we continue on a course that honors and abides with all of Creation.
  
  
• 
  J.A. Ironside

  Audio ARC provided by NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
  
  Audio review: Narrator was good, kept me engaged with subject matter that was both interesting and upsetting.
  
  Main review: This is a very ambitious book. Basically a full natural history of North America from the Pleistocene onwards, and in many ways the author pulls it off. The look at the direct result of evolving populations of humans and human culture on wildlife populations was very interesting - in fact it's pretty hard to argue that we have not caused huge amounts of extinction. Nor does Flores lecture without exploring why extinction occurs - aside from human greed and economical concerns, there's also competition between groups of humans, the issue of biological first contact and the speed of adaptation of other species. There was a lot of interesting examination of animal culture - how the difference between human intelligence and other higher mammal intelligence is one of degree not kind. And there are notes of hope here as well. That said, this was also a profoundly upsetting book. Our ancestors reached through time and stole a different future from us (and we appear to be doing the same thing to our future descendants). This brought back all the distress I felt when I was six years old and really grasping what extinction was and humanity's place in that process. So be warned, if you are sensitive to accounts of animals being hunted for sport and profit and just because, this book is pretty depressing. Overall though, it's a fascinating read and Flores does a great job of putting humans back within the context of the animal kingdomw where we belong.
• 
  Kylie Sparkle

  I was excited to order this book thinking it would be a deep dive into North America's ancient animal behaviors and interaction. Intertwined with native American tribes and European colonialism. Unfortunately, that is not what this book is.
  
  This book is a sporadic and unorganized 'neat facts' collection regarding various naturalists, pioneers, and scientists. These 'neat facts' are also repetitive because there is no structure to the book, so later on, the same naturalist that only got a few paragraphs devoted to them is reappearing. It's also 200+ pages of bemoaning the unchecked killing of animals. Do I agree that it's a pity our ancestors murdered wantlessly? Yes. Do I want continuous chapters that blur together with no sense of timeline nor focus other than moaning about animal overkill? No.
  
  There's a few sentences that try and cover all the various native American tribes religious deities and the stories behind them. Not what I was expecting from a book proclaiming itself an "epic" starting from North America's origins.
  
  Too much narrative and author insertion as well. Page 240 Flores felt it necessary to write "f***ing pathetic" in regard to the massacre of buffalos in the plains.
  
  A huge let down of a book since I was considering it to be laymen academic.
• 
  Ben

  3.5. While this book was still worth reading, there were several problems with it in my opinion. First, this book talks about people (mostly dead, white, male Americans) as much as it talks about animals. While the title tells you that, I was hopeful it would actually talk more about how native peoples interacted with animals before colonialism. While native people were not necessarily erased, their stories, history, culture, etc most of the time felt like an afterthought to the white American stories. Second, you can tell the author is not a scientist. He is just plain wrong a lot of the time (calling humans carnivores instead of omnivores), and other times when I was hoping for deeper scientific scrutiny or information, it wasn’t there. Lastly, the book is all over the place. While it’s kinda chronological, it doesn’t feel that way at a lot of points and it can be very confusing. Still worth a read if you like this sort of thing but would not recommend to people more casually interested in ecological history.
• 
  Chip Fallaw

  This book took me nearly a MONTH to finish. And that’s partly my fault, as I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into when I started. If you’re like me, and can’t give up on books you start, you’re in for a dense but wonderful history of America’s animals. In addition to being dense, parts of this book are exceptionally depressing. Namely, the things American, from naturalists to past presidents, did to animals in the 1700, 1800 and 1900. Understanding what Americans did to animals should certainly be part of history classes taught to everyone, in an effort to also understand how impressive and important our conservation efforts have been and will be in the coming future. I’d encourage this as a read, and only gave it four stars due to the density of information and time it took to complete. In terms of research done by the author to complete this book, this is certainly a five star book.
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  S.B. Harrison

  What a dazzling story of wildlife in America. There is such an astonishing array of facts in this book. I was practically drooling in the first couple of chapters reading about things that happened millions of years ago. Things only become more interesting as we move further along in time rapidly approaching the present.
  
  To be honest it is mostly sad and depressing facts that need to be learned so the same mistakes aren’t repeated. It truly is a sin what humans have done to so many beautiful and amazing animals just in the name of a “free market.” It is also incredible what we have done to make up for it, and how when we put or minds to it, can truly accomplish incredible things.
  
  Dan Flores truly does a magnificent job at detailing the journey humans, animals, and our planet have endured together. I highly recommend this book for anyone even remotely interested in natural history.
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  Doug Gordon

  As always, Dan Flores writes an interesting story combining multiple disciplines to tell the story of the unique fauna of North America and its relationship to our species in particular. Some of the chapters were difficult to read when they covered the mass slaughter of animals in the "market hunting" economy of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's tragic that so many unique animals were unnecessarily driven to extinction.
  
  At least the book ends on a somewhat higher note, telling the history of the various movements that have managed to preserve what is left of the old "wild" country and even restore the populations of some of the animals that were once barely holding onto existence: bison, wolves, beavers, condors, eagles, and others.