Richard Ellis (1) (1938–2024)

I'm going to start off my first real review for this site with a short story.

My mom and I were at the Toronto Zoo the other day, and in their "Caves and Burrows of Africa" house, there's a sign above a fish tank proclaiming "EXTINCTION IS FOREVER". Upon seeing this, a woman said "They don't have to be so dramatic about it."

-sigh-

Extinction is forever. End of. We might be getting close to resurrecting long gone species like, the mammoth, or closer deaths, like the Tasmanian Tiger, but, what show more are we going to do with them? We can't put them back in the wild, so they'd pretty much be novelties. Richard Ellis's book documents a variety of extinction events, and non-events. He begins with a description of what extinction is. Sort of. As you'll learn, it's kind of a loose term, and no one quite agrees on it. From there, we go on a tour of the major extinctions, the dinosaurs, the Pleistocene extinctions (That's the one with the mammoths and sabre-tooths and all the other "ice age" animals), etc. Then we get into the big point and cause of all of the rest, and probably the Pleistocene one too, and that is our good friend, enemy and lover, Homo sapiens sapiens. If there was a thesis for the latter half of this book, it would be just 4 words: "It's all our fault." This book can be rather depressing in that aspect, pointing the finger squarely at ourselves as read about species, gone from the Earth, never to be seen again from our own greed, reckless abandon, and stupidity. It's not all glum though, as he recounts the stories of animals we've saved. I truly believe humans are generally good, because even though we have the greatest ability to screw up ever developed, we also have the ability to fix things.

Richard Ellis's style is quite easy to read, and informal. He doesn't throw around big words for the sake of "I'm so smart and better at everything>", and this book is quite accessible to those who have no background in biology or extinctions or animals. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject, as Ellis provides an excellent jumping off point, with plenty of resources and books mentioned throughout.

I'll end with another story, this one kind of depressing. One of the species mentioned in this book, published in 2004, is the baiji, or Chinese River Dolphin. The baiji has not been seen in sometime, and is widely considered extinct, or that the few animals left could never re-breed enough to save them. We were too late to save the Chinese River Dolphin. We don't have to let any more slip through to the other side, and we can do something. I don't know what, but something. show less

This book was all about discoveries made about the marine life on the planet. It concentrates on those discoveries made in the last hundred years. The book was published in 2005 and there are parts of it that are dated, but still it is worth the time spent to read its 220 informative pages.

This book was chocked full of all kinds of information about marine life of all kinds. It read like an encyclopedia, but a very well written encyclopedia. It is even formatted like an encyclopedia with show more double columns just as encyclopedias had. Each chapter was short enough to make reading the dense text pleasurable and informative without being boring, but long enough to be a quick survey of the topic. It is perfect for an overview of the subject but not so long that it got boring or too academic.

It was also a blunt book, in that the author simply says at the end that marine life at all levels of the food chain are on the edge of extinction. He warns that fin fisheries are unlikely to ever recover, so the world's oceans will NOT be the source of protein now or in the future. The author does a great job of making people who eat fish feel guilty about eating anything that comes from the ocean except for farmed fish. I eat at Long John Silver's once a year and I think it is time for me to end that practice. I am feeling a bit self-righteous about eating fish. I stopped eating fish, except for the aforementioned once-a-year excursion, after I read Mark Kurlansky's book on Cod almost 20 years ago. This book merely reaffirms my resolve. show less

This book takes a look at Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and its effect on wildlife populations, some endangered. Ellis looks more specifically at rhinos, tigers and bears.

It's a very good, informative book, and I don't think the author takes sides (although I am firmly in one camp on the issue, so my judgment could be clouded). He presents a lot of statistics, and it's hard to see how TCM isn't affecting the populations of these endangered species. Yes, there are other things affecting show more it, as well, but to see what some of these animal parts are worth (in some cases, more than gold), can leave little doubt as to why they are being poached. Of course, there are also other things affecting the numbers of these species, most notably, human encroachment, but the focus of this book is on TCM. The chapter on bears is tough, with the descriptions of extracting bear bile from live bears, but I think people need to know what's going on. There was also a really interesting chapter comparing the history of TCM to the history of Western medicine, and they are surprisingly similar, until more recent times.

And now, one day after writing my review (though I haven't yet posted it anywhere), I read that one subspecies of rhino is officially extinct, partly due to TCM and poaching. One that was barely holding on when this book was written. show less

Ellis's books deals with many aspects of the Atlantis phenomenon - Plato's motives in telling the story, more-or-less reasonable attempts to identify a real Atlantis, its use in modern fiction and mysticism - but concentrates on the idea that the story represents a distorted memory of the end of Minoan Crete and/or the catastrophic eruption of Thera (Santorini), which may or may not have been a factor in the former. Ellis himself, it should be noted, doesn't believe in this idea, but thinks show more that Plato wanted to spin a story with a moral, not report ancient history or retell a legend.

This could have been a great book, but it's marred by two significant problems. First, there are too many repetitions, the same events and ideas being recounted repeatedly, from slightly different points of view. One might think this the result of editing together a number of originally separate essays or articles, but according to what Ellis says in the forword about the book's origin that doesn't seem to apply. Whatever the reason, it's annoying and sloppy.

Second, and worse, Ellis is also careless about facts, the book being littered by little errors, some just sloppy, like claiming that 1500 BC is about twenty-five centuries ago, some seemingly from careless reading of sources, like mixing up AD and BC dates. Sometimes he doesn't seem to have quite understood his sources, like in a brief discussion of language where he implies that Greek was succeeded by "Cretan" - does he confuse the temporal order of Greek and the undeciphered language of the Linear A inscriptions, or did he misunderstand the replacement of Mycenaean Greek of the Linear B inscriptions by the Doric dialects of classical Crete to involve a non-Greek incoming "Cretan" language? Most of the errors I noticed concerns issues outside Ellis's own speciality of marine biology, but at one point he confuses the Sirenia and the Sirenidae; presumably he knows better than that, but again, was careless, and evidently the publisher didn't have a competent fact checker either. show less