By Martin Jenkins
A gentle, beautifully drawn nonfiction book about endangered and extinct animals: what's already gone, what's still here, and what saving them would actually cost. Martin Jenkins is a conservation biologist, and he doesn't pretend to know how it ends.
Jenkins begins with the animals that are already gone. The dodo. The great auk. Steller's sea cow, which people found and ate until there were none left, all within twenty-seven years. The marsupial wolf, shown in a photograph-like drawing of the very last one. Then he turns to the animals still here and asks what it would actually take to keep them: the tiger, the white-rumped vulture that all but vanished from India after a drug given to cattle poisoned it by the tens of millions, the partula snail, the ground iguana, the sawfish, the kakapo. Vicky White drew every one in pencil and oils, and they are extraordinary, huge and soft and looking straight back at you. Jenkins doesn't tidy any of it. He tells your child that the American bison came back and the great auk didn't, in the same steady voice, and he's honest that saving what's left is hard and costs a lot.
Jenkins writes like someone who has actually worked in this field, unhurried and a little rueful, and he never talks down. That makes it a good fit for an older animal-lover who's started to notice when grown-ups round the corners off a hard subject; some children find it a relief to be handed the real shape of a thing instead. And the pictures carry the feeling the calm text leaves alone. Vicky White's animals are close-up and enormous, and it's hard to look that vulture in the face and feel nothing.