Man's grim record of crimes against nature

The Sixth Extinction. An Unnatural History. By Elizabeth Kolbert. Bloomsbury, €16.35. Reviewed by Brendan Daly.

The tiny island of Castello Aragonese, west of Naples, is on a fault line between the Africa and Eurasia plates.

The Sixth Extinction

**An Unnatural History**

**By** Elizabeth Kolbert

**Bloomsbury,** €16.35

**Reviewed by** Brendan Daly

.....

In natural history, the Big Five' is an innocuous title for a category of catastrophe. It refers to five cataclysmic events over the last 500 million years that caused mass extinction. The best known obliterated the dinosaurs after a huge asteroid collided with the Earth. But the Big Five' narrative is about to change to accommodate a ...