Will I love Shimmer?

I was deeply moved reading this book, a treatise about impending species death written by a fellow anthropologist facing her own death. The text freely moves back-and-forth between abstract reflections about life on the edge and observations on the mutual relations between indigenous Australians and flying-foxes (the only flying mammals in existence), now seriously threatened by both global warming and human encroachment.

This is not only a unique near-extinction saga; its language and framing took me straight into some of the biggest issues of our time, of what the author calls deathwork, the living dead, and double death, where death… show more.