The most recommended books about mammoths

This story was both heartbreaking and beautiful. I loved the second-person narration of Meixing’s journey. It was unusual but very effective in helping me understand what it’s like to feel so alone after arriving in a new country and a new home in a big city.

The author’s compassionate and gentle approach in expressing mammoth emotions was a standout. Metaphors and imagery contained in the work weren’t overdone. Tragic circumstances behind the move are softened by magical elements that turn the story around.

The glasshouse is where Meixing finds solace. It holds the sun, moon, and secrets. I loved watching her harness all her bravery to find her place in her new world after losing almost all that she trusts and understands—destined to become a classic.

Two great talents came together to produce this classic story of a bored baby who annoys his parents by drawing on the walls. Only their home is a cave. In the night, he is whisked away by a mammoth, which could be terrifying, but the great beast just wants the baby to paint animals on his cave walls.

Willy Ley was a fascinating individual – a member and founder of the German VfR, the Rocket Society whose membership included Werner von Braun.

He fled Nazi Germany and settled in the United States, writing popular science articles, translating German science fiction, and writing some of his own. He was instrumental in popularizing the Space effort, even appearing on Disney’s Man into Space shows on television.

But he wrote on a range of topics, and his articles discussed the dwarf elephant fossil role in the myth of the Cyclops, the possible origins of the Babylonian sirrush, the role of fossil mammoths and wooly rhinoceros in shaping European legends, and the possible origins of the Unicorn legend.

The Last Animal has a storyline I’ve never encountered before. Asubel writes in such a readable way about extinct creatures and science but also about typical teen challenges and family relationships.

I was so moved by the baby mammoth – what it symbolized about our existence on this planet and our connections to each other. Having two daughters about the same age as Eve and Vera, and growing up with sisters myself, I could deeply relate to both their relationship and what it is like to be their mother, Jane.

This book is both fantastical and yet completely believable in ways at the same time and the ending made me teary.

This was such a surprising collection of darkly hopeful stories.

As with any anthology, some land more than others, but the ones that did land did so much like a crater impacting Earth. Stufflebeam has the ability to draw not just on shared experience but deeply buried collective guilt.

It is impossible not to connect with the characters, even when they’re possessed houses or engineers tearing out the insides of still-living sex dolls. How do you drive empathy for these characters? How can the serial killing of androids be compelling? Stufflebeam slithers into our subconscious, drags up our long-buried guilt, and weaves it into almost bizarre caricatures of the human experience that resonate.

I didn’t sleep well for several days after reading this book, which speaks well to the gentle horror genre as a whole.

Bite-sized bits of world knowledge are a great way to explore the world from the comfort of your own living room (or car or classroom). Visuals and a timeline help kids navigate history, discoveries, wars, revolutions, and inventions. This is the type of book kids can pick up and put down anytime. It also adds to general knowledge and builds great ideas for family trivia night!

The earth is in an another extinction period, and humans blame ourselves.

So we have the motive (guilt) to de-extinct what were once living organisms, like the passenger pigeon, Tasmanian tigers, and dodo bird. It turns out we also have the means: selective breeding, cellular cloning, CRISPR/Fanzor for specific genetic modifications.

All we needed was opportunity, and we have that now, too, in well-funded labs that can justify spending huge amounts of money on cloning a mammoth. But wiser men than I have raised an important question. What are the risks? This is why Britt Wray’s Rise of the Necrofauna is a must read for anyone planning a future vacation to a de-extinct zoo—like me.

Kathryn is the best sci-fi author you haven’t read. How do I know? I was her critique buddy. We traded chapters as we wrote, each acting as advisor to the other.

I really liked Monkey Girl, a great choice for teen girls. But Project Hannibal is my favorite. Kathryn works at a zoo, so she knows a lot about animals. In Hannibal, she asks, could DNA from extinct woolly mammoths be used to impregnate a modern elephant? And if you could produce mammoth offspring, why do it?

As it turns out, mammoths might be exactly the wildlife our neglected planet needs. Join a flying doctor and her teenage assistant in a grand adventure across the wilderness of Alaska.

I picked up this book because of its gorgeous front cover. Reading the back cover, I was instantly mesmerized. Such ravishing words! And such a strange notion. What would happen if suddenly, mammoth trees shot up and filled every space, splintering and sweeping houses, shops, gas stations, and roads up into their inexorable, growing, entwined branches? Civilization is shattered—electricity, running water, communications, all gone—and in its place is an endless forest. This is a story of apocalypse like no other, lovely and terrible in equal measure. Our extremely reluctant hero, Adrien, must learn to not just survive in the world of the trees, but to find its magic, and to help humanity have a proper place in it. Mythical and deeply philosophical.

Reviewers of The Great Fossil Enigma thought that book strange. If they tried to think of a book like it, then they alighted on this one. I don’t see much similarity, but I do think Cohen’s book is strange. Her first paragraph is a single sentence of just seven words. It is: ‘This is not a book about mammoths.’ That sentence isn’t quite true because the book is about mammoths, but Cohen uses these animals as a pretext for a much grander history of science. The approach couldn’t be more different from the other books on my list.