"Who are we bound to and in what ways?" This is the question at the heart of this wonderful book. But the "we" here is not limited to "us" -- it includes vultures who help the living take care of the dead, Little penguins who keep returning to deeply storied places, fledging albatrosses who are becoming more and more vulnerable, and mourning crows who can enrich our definitions of grieving. And that changes everything. Because this question is not a simple intellectual proposition. It creates links even as it explores those links in all their dimensions. One finds oneself differently attached after reading this book. A magnificent, sensitive, and marvellously intelligent book. It tells stories of extinction while reinspiring us with life and curiosity.

In proposing to move beyond simplistic categories like the natural and the cultural, the biological and the social, the living and the dead, Thom van Dooren reconfigures, in an inventive and brilliant manner, traditional oppositions between species conservation and attention to individuals. With keen attention and contagious curiosity, he explores the multiple forms of living together in a multi-species world. Every page of this book teaches us something about other forms and ways of life, makes us think differently or more deeply than we have been in the habit of thinking, and helps us to do so in company with the beings of other species. Thom van Dooren teaches us that to care passionately can be a weapon of resistance against the forces of destruction. This book is guided by the most philosophical and lively of motives: curiosity with regard to other beings and their ways of life. A curiosity for fleshly creatures -- creatures who are real, concrete, surprising in their complexity, and who become, by way of their histories, more attaching, which is to say more capable of attaching us. This book is magnificent and brilliant. One reason -- not the only nor the least -- is because Thom van Dooren has spent time with the animals whose becoming he is examining.

The ethical questions he poses are thus equally ethological questions, questions that demand not only care, but also interest and curiosity. Specific ways of living require specific modes of thought. The stories in this book -- since they are truly stories that enrich our storied worlds -- make this magnificent gamble succeed: to learn other ways of thinking from other forms of life.