We Loved It All

November 1, 2023

A Pulitzer Prize finalist shortlisted for the National Book Award, Millet turns to nonfiction for the first time with a cri de coeur imploring readers to understand their lives as being intimately tied to the natural world. A work of essays and nature writing, the title also veers into memoir. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from February 26, 2024
Novelist Millet (Dinosaurs), also a creative director at the Center for Biological Diversity, ruminates in this profoundly affecting meditation on what it means to live through climate change. The narrative flows as if by instinct, moving from personal anecdotes to condemnations of corporate pollution to elegiac examinations of the havoc wrought by humans on the natural world, the organizing logic arising tacitly through suggestion and juxtaposition. In that vein, Millet’s admission of how she used to believe systemic explanations constituted attempts to evade personal responsibility leads into a discussion of how the mid-1970s “Crying Indian” anti-litter campaign redirected culpability from the companies selling single-use plastic products to consumers. Contemplations of mortality recur throughout, as when Millet writes “I fear that my children one day... will be forced to endure the vanishing of much more than we ever did” and discusses how the last Tasmanian tiger died in 1936 after “she was locked out of the warm part of her enclosure overnight in a cold snap and froze.” In scintillating prose, Millet makes a passionate case that humans must own up to their responsibilities to each other and the natural world (“Our coexistence has been, since forever, the backdrop of being. A dappled, shifting impression like the patterns of sun and shadows that fall across beds and ceilings and walls”). Mournful and piercingly beautiful, this will stick with readers long after they finish the last page.

February 15, 2024
The acclaimed novelist's first work of nonfiction examines the interconnected web of creatures on planet Earth. In the modern era, despite increasing species endangerment and extinction, we continue to extract resources, hastening the destruction of the natural world. As Millet writes in one memorable passage, "Our way of life is not a triumph anymore but a mass suicide." In the past 50 years, wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69%; in the biodiverse regions of Central and South America, that number is near 94%. Using the terms species aloneness or species loneliness, the author examines "a dawning era in which the solitude we already know--as individuals of a deeply social species who are more and more shut off from our own physical communities--will be echoed by a greater silence gathering around." In the wake of such immense animal loss, how do we define ourselves in the sudden quiet? Millet suggests looking to children's respect and empathy for animals. By adulthood, we tend to define ourselves not as part of the animal kingdom, but by our "humanness," creating a divide where there could be a bridge. In lucid prose, the author illustrates the stories of several fascinating species, bringing us into their wondrous worlds. She also writes about the people in her life with similar insight and livelihood--her parents and children appear among other notable figures. While individual elements are compelling and well rendered, the occasionally jumbled structure restricts opportunity for narrative absorption. Readers may wish for deeper treatments of emergent themes of animal welfare and conservation. Still, the author offers a well-written, poignant lament for the greater animal kingdom to which we owe not just our survival as a species but our joy and companionship. A philosophically tinted testament to the challenge of loving animals in an epoch defined by extinction.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 15, 2024
Millet's (Dinosaurs, 2022) passion for the living world and concern over humanity's tragic role in destroying it is evident in her fiction. In her first work of nonfiction, she steps into the light, sharing personal stories and her informed observations of the extinction crisis as a conservationist long-associated with the Center for Biological Diversity. Millet contrasts humanity's violence toward animals with the central roles animals play in place-based, preindustrial cultures and every child's imagination. She considers the impact of Christianity on the West's elevating of humanity above the rest of nature, how those in the know long concealed the truth about climate change, and why we're failing to address planetary crises. Bewitched by our screens and filtered versions of reality, we are largely unversed in science and deluded in our assumptions about solutions to environmental disasters. And our priorities are skewed. Millet reports that we spent $490 million in 2018 on our pets' Halloween costumes, five times the funds budgeted to protect endangered species. In a recalibrating mix of memoir, facts, critique, and passages of elegiac beauty, Millet reflects on our dangerous muddlement and pins hope on the growing impact of one digital advance, our ability to more fully perceive "the awesome variety"" of life on Earth in all its "grandeur" and "precariousness."

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.