I picked this book up because it’s subtitled Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction, and it got a further punch of urgency from the strapline by Eric Idle, ‘Put this at the head of your reading lists immediately’.

I thought it might be about one of the emergencies the great and the good are either ignoring or subverting for profit – you know, war, the rise of fascism, climate crisis… but it’s not. It’s about how we’ve got our genes in a twist and if we don’t take action now, we might be extinct in… ten thousand years or so.

One of the reviewers said it had ‘lashes of humour’ – I wondered if they meant ‘lashings’ but — Well here we are, with a senile maniac running the United States and a bunch of criminals running the UK and quite a lot of Europe, teetering on the point of no return on climate, wondering if the world will last long enough to serve as home to our grandchildren, whilst most people can’t be persuaded to look into dealing with the climate crisis or the genocidal steamrollers of the arms industry and the Epstein regime…

… but enough people can be persuaded to worry about whether ‘we’ can survive more than ten thousand years to create a bestseller.

That’s why it’s a really dreadful book but I read it avidly and, if you’re interested in humans at all, I suggest you do too. Why? Because it is genuinely well researched: I learned a lot, and because it’s genuinely entertaining: I read it from start to finish with no foot-dragging at all.

Some tantrums, but no foot-dragging.

On how to save us from extinction, Gee discusses women (the emancipation of), migrants (the increasing value of) and ‘the Green revolution’ (the vital nature of) as parts of the possible solutions to our ‘deadly’ dilemma. He discusses them, and why all are so beneficial to human survival generally – and then passes on and starts discussing how, ‘in the next two hundreds years of so’, we might develop fully independent human colonies in space.

He also mentions that we probably won’t, but what caused my biggest tantrum was that he presents modern city life, so utterly artificial and disconnected from earth, as proof that we’d be perfectly happy in sealed units of ‘city’ floating around in space, and/or in capsules on other planets or in asteroids.

Perfectly happy. Like city folk are now? As a feminist, I’m well aware of the fact that women in the UK are killed by male associates/partners at the rate of one or two a week, but when considering men, we should also think about the fact that they kill themselves, and each other, at an even faster rate. Happy? That’s not what I’d call happy.

And if we spend that ‘next two hundred years or so’ working endlessly on the space-race, we’ll have generated enough pollution to guarantee the final destruction of planet earth.

…but never mind, although it’s unlikely our ecosphere can hold it together for another hundred years, we know a way ‘we’ might survive for ten thousand. Humans are bonkers. No wonder they’re in danger of extinction. If only they’d spend more time thinking about why independent, well-educated women, a healthy mix of migrants in the population and decent food might help us, and less time getting excited about space travel and how to write bestselling books, there might still be some hope of saving this, our world.

…but never mind, read this book – it’s interesting, gripping in fact — I think it is, albeit by accident, a really good book about everything that’s wrong with the world, with men, and with the book industry.

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