This was a very thought provoking read, an imagining of the world if suddenly humans were removed from it, as if by the Rapture or by an alien species.

It takes us, step by step, through various environments around the world, including cities and suburbs, deserts and rainforests, and points out what we would leave there if we were suddenly gone. Then it imagines how nature would go about undoing our intrusion into the ecosystem.

One interesting place is New England of today, where it was farmed when first colonized, but then abandoned as farmland as richer and easier areas were found in the expanding United States, mostly in the Midwest. The area is returning to the forests of before, with notable inclusions, species that were introduced by the European colonists of both animals and plants. It shows how little resistance our building structures will have to Mother Nature as the environment returns to its more or less natural state.

Of more concern are the polymer creations, especially tires. And of course, there is the nuclear waste we are creating - ores that without our intervention will heat up until they break out of their human-made containments and wreak some havoc in the nearby environment.

It looks at the past, at the megafauna that roamed the continent before people got here. And we're not talking about Europeans - we're talking about those earlier inhabitants of our part of the world, who probably hunted wooly mammoths and giant sloths and other huge animals to extinction before the ice age finished the job for them.

It's a very interesting, very thought provoking read. Not my usual fare, but quite good.