“Hanski cut a wide swath across ecology, evolution, and conservation biology, with innovative approaches to understanding the distribution, diversity, and vicissitudes of life on earth at all levels, from genes through entire ecosystems and from microbes to mammals. All scientists know his key finding that much of nature is distributed as metapopulations of loosely connected, largely isolated populations, his insights on the mechanisms of population and species extinction, and his elegant field research on insect populations. As Hanski makes clear in Messages from Islands, almost all of his inspiration and insights originate with his observations and research on many islands around the world, and his work on islands and work of many others, such as Darwin and Wallace, have underpinned a huge fraction of what we know about biodiversity today, how it came to be as it is, and the forces currently threatening it. In each chapter, using one of his many island explorations as a springboard, he develops in comprehensive yet accessible language an aspect of scientific knowledge of the diversity of life. In sum, Hanski’s book is an elegant, engaging, and remarkably thorough description of the scope and wonderfully intricate details of biodiversity, as well as what we must do to save it.”