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Sonderbooks Book Review of

Lost Animals

Extinction and the Photographic Record

by Errol Fuller


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Lost Animals

Extinction and the Photographic Record

by Errol Fuller

Review posted May 3, 2015.
Princeton University Press, 2013. 256 pages.

This is a fascinating book. The idea is simple: The author has compiled actual photographs of animals whose species are now extinct. There is information about each animal and details about when each one presumably died out.

In many ways, it's a tragic book. Especially painful are pictures such as the one of a dead Yangtze River Dolphin taken with the hunter who shot it.

Mostly, the pictures are fascinating in themselves. As the author says in the Introduction:

It seems that a photograph of something lost or gone has a power all of its own, even though it may be tantalizingly inadequate.