Join the Big Library Read: May 9-23

The Big Library Read, facilitated by OverDrive, is a reading program through your library that connects readers around the world with the same eBook or eAudio at the same time without any wait lists or holds.

Find both the eBook and eAudio editions on our OverDrive page.


Most Recent Title

Wild New World by Dan Flores

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness.

Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America - a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before.

The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction” to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades.

In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.

Letter from the Author, opens a new window | Group Discussion Guide


About the Author

Dan Flores is a Santa Fe-area writer originally from Louisiana who spent much of his career as a University of Montana professor. The author of 11 books, he has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Magazine

Along with appearances on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown and Joe Rogan’s podcasts, Flores is featured in Ken Burns’s 2023 American Buffalo documentary. His most recent books are American Serengeti, winner of the Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize in 2017; Coyote America, a 2016 New York Times Bestseller, and Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Prize winner and Finalist for PEN America’s E. O. Wilson Prize in 2017; and Wild New World, winner of the 2023 Rachel Carson Environment Book Prize and the 2023 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature.


CRRL Picks: OverDrive's Big Library Read

The Big Library Read is facilitated by OverDrive, is a reading program through your library that connects readers around the world with the same ebook at the same time without any wait lists or holds. Check out the current and previous titles on this booklist.






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