Review by Choice Review
Stone has prepared a brief book, written in a somewhat journalistic style, telling the story of mammoths found frozen in Siberia. The author interweaves his personal tale of travel as a science journalist with the history of discovery and recovery of Pleistocene meat and bones. Add to the mixture tales of modern-day adventure hunters and scientists bent on cloning extinct animals and the result is a fairly interesting read. But in the final analysis, this book is only about scientists and their stories, not about the real thing--finding how these animals lived, what they tasted like, and who hunted them. Recommended for general readers as well as lower- and upper-division undergraduates. P. K. Strother Boston College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Woolly mammoths are one of the most evocative of extinct creatures. Our ancestors hunted and ate the enormous furry elephants and recorded their images in numerous cave paintings. Mammoth carcasses are occasionally found frozen and preserved in Siberian ice, and much has been learned about what they ate, how they lived, and even what they smelled like. Stone follows a multinational team into Siberia as they attempt to excavate and airlift a mammoth carcass known as "the Jarkov" after its discoverers. Stone follows the ups and downs of the excavation, also filmed for the Discovery Channel, as the workers battle the elements, balky equipment, local superstitions, and time (the summer season is short) to remove the enormous animal. The author weaves what is scientifically known about mammoths into his narrative of the current excavation, along with past histories of previous mammoth finds and the hope of making discoveries from the Jarkov carcass. Would it be possible to clone a living animal from undamaged frozen cells of this long-deceased animal? --Nancy Bent
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In March 2000, 10 million Discovery Channel viewers watched scientists airlift a 23-ton chunk of Siberian permafrost containing a still-frozen woolly mammoth carcass. Stone, Science magazine's European news editor, describes the banal events preceding the extraordinary excavation: a young boy sees a tusk protruding from the ground; his father and uncle unearth and sell the tusk to an arctic explorer, whose excavation plans conflict with the local Dolgan people's reverence for the earth; the red tape-tangled Russian government cooperates. Stone interviews the top mammoth experts and documents the most significant excavations of the past two centuries. These once abundant "great shaggy beasts," cousins of modern Asian and African elephants, suddenly went extinct at the end of the Great Ice Age some 11,000 years ago. Three well-balanced chapters explore the primary, and often conflicting, theories on mammoth extinction: shifting weather patterns caused by climate change, overhunting by humans and a "hyperdisease" passed from humans to mammoths. Certain scientists, Stone says, not only want to understand the mammoth's disappearance they also hope to bring the beast back to life. He recounts the pioneering, controversial efforts of some Japanese scientists, who hope to recover enough well-preserved tissue to create either an elephant-mammoth hybrid or a mammoth clone. Stone professes his own belief that, someday, "woolly mammoths will once again walk the earth." Exploring the environmental ramifications of bringing extinct animals back to life, and invoking Jurassic Park, Stone describes an ambitious plan to restore the prehistoric mammoth steppe habitat in Siberia. Although sometimes digressive and overly detailed, his account offers a provocative look at the world of today's mammoth hunters. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
To discover the frozen remains of a woolly mammoth holds out the tantalizing prospect of finding tissue with DNA that could be used for cloning. The possibility of bringing back to life an extinct animal from a different age is both exciting and fraught with environmental ramifications, not least of which is the proposal to create a Pleistocene Park. These are just a few of the fascinating topics covered in Stone's account of the so-called Jarkov mammoth in a Siberian cave and the Discovery Channel's coverage of the excavation, airlift, and subsequent storage of this mammoth's remains. Various theories explaining the mammoths' extinction are reviewed, including the most recently proposed hyperdisease theory. We also learn of the indigenous people, the Dolgan, who are warm and hospitable to their foreign visitors as well as essential for locating mammoth remains. Modern technology like ground-penetrating radar are starkly contrasted with the outdated Soviet equipment, Russia's poor economy and lack of resources, and black-market control of available commodities. The European news editor for Science magazine, Stone offers an informative and interesting book. Recommended for public libraries. Gloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll., Kansas City, MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The wild, but far from fanciful, project of bringing the woolly mammoth out of the deep freeze-and perhaps back to life-artfully told by Science magazine editor Stone. Saber-toothed cats, cave lions, and the woolly mammoth exert a powerful juju over the modern imagination precisely because they are contemporaneous species, Stone suggests: We can imagine being among them far more so than we can the dinosaurs. Since the first mammoths were exhumed from the Arctic ice back in the early 19th century, they have had us tied around their tusks. Here, Stone follows the work of latter-day mammoth hunters in their quest to answer some mammoth questions: Why did they suffer extinction some 11,000 years ago, and is it possible to bring one back to life with the aid of long-dead sperm or cloning? As he explains the work of Bernard Buigues, Nikolai Vereshchagin, and Kazumufi Goto, Stone covers such new theories as the mammoths having died off as a result of a virulent pathogen akin to the Ebola virus introduced by hunters or perhaps by their dogs, as he works to explain why old notions of overhunting and climate change now seem less probable. This includes the alarming idea of unleashing ancient forms of infectious disease. But surely most incredible is the possibility of bringing the mammoth back through techniques of sperm transfer or cloning, first proposed back in 1980: taking an enucleated elephant egg and endowing it with a feasible mammoth nucleus, then zapping it with electricity to divide and grow. Yet there are other questions that arise should this cloning come to fruition, such as where the creature would live, whether its life would be worthy of the name-not to mention all the moral issues that surround cloning. Stone's visits to the mammoth sites are rich portraits of a place and its peoples. A lively, polished scientific detective story that continues to unfold.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
