What begins as a routine account of the migration to winter quarters of a flock of birds—unusual birds, it is true—develops into a tense tale of the struggle of the great auks against the forces which unwittingly combined to annihilate them as a species. The author calls [The Great Auk] a novel and rightly so: a more powerful or tragic plot can hardly be matched by anything conceived in the mind of a great writer. (p. 269)

Eckert is masterful when describing incidents and places, some purely imaginative…. [His] descriptions are vivid, palpable, intensely real. Amazingly he seems most effective when seeing and assessing these things through the eyes and minds of his "characters," a tribute to his imaginative genius.

This reviewer confesses that he approached the task of reading The Great Auk with little or no relish: just a bird story, he mused. However, he finished...