'Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture': new review of "Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene"

We are pleased to announce that Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene edited by Wendy A. Wiseman and Burak Kesgin has been reviewed by Steven E. Silvern (Salem State University) and published in the 'Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture', Vol. 19 (2025) 1-3:

[...] “Lost Kingdom” is a worthwhile book, challenging readers to recognize the material and ideological forces behind the mass extinctions of animals in the Anthropocene. The book asks us to bear witness to the loss of animals’ life, to empathize with non-humans, and to work towards a radical relationality with the animal world. [...]

[Extract from book review on the 'Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture', Vol. 19 (2025) 1-3. Published online: 2025-11-03. Reviewer: Steven E. Silvern (Salem State University). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.33043]

Find out more about the book and order your copy here: Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene
The authors in ‘Lost Kingdom’ grapple with both the catastrophe of mass animal extinction, in which the panoply of earthly life is in the accelerating process of disappearing, and with the mass death of industrial animal agriculture. Both forms of anthropogenic violence against animals cast the Anthropocene as an era of criminality and loss driven by boundless human exceptionalism, forcing a reckoning with and an urgent reimagining of human-animal relations. Without the sleights of hand that would lump “humanity” into a singular Anthropos of the Anthropocene, the authors recognize the differential nature of human impacts on animal life and the biosphere as a whole, while affirming the complexity of animal worlds and their profound imbrications in human cultures, societies, and industries. Confronting the reality of the Sixth Mass Extinction and mass animal death requires forms of narrativity that draw on traditional genres and disciplines, while signaling a radical break with modern temporalities and norms. Chapters in this volume reflect this challenge, while embodying the interdisciplinary nature of inquiry into non-human animality at the edge of the abyss—historiography, cultural anthropology, post-colonial studies, literary criticism, critical animal studies, ethics, religious studies, Anthropocene studies, and extinction studies entwine to illuminate what is arguably the greatest crisis, for all creatures, in the past 65 million years.

Title Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene [Hardback]
Edition 1st
ISBN 978-1-64889-772-6
Published in January 2024