A review of A Message from Martha in the Guardian.
This book has had mostly good reviews, and some very good reviews, and a couple of stinkers. Obviously, as an author one tries to believe the good reviews and tries to dismiss the bad ones, but the bad ones tend to stick in one’s mind – or is that just me?
This review is a very good review, so I’ll try to believe it!
Here are some extracts:
‘This absorbing book is an engaging and wistful, yet measured, chronicle about the tragic loss of one very special, iconic, species, the passenger pigeon.‘
‘Avery sets out on a quirky and often amusing five-week road trip — a quest if you prefer — around the eastern portion of the United States where he visits the precise locations where passenger pigeons were reported more than one hundred years ago. He finds the flight paths followed, their roosts and of course, recorded nesting locations. Although this sounds like a daft idea, it’s appealing. It instills a sense of propinquity, of place. And it works. Along the way, Dr Avery shows that the extinction of the passenger pigeon was just one of many casualties resulting from a suite of social and economic changes occurring in the United States at the time; geographic and population growth, wars, the abolition of slavery and the wanton destruction of natural resources on a massive scale. Altogether, it’s an interesting and expansive look at the history of the region, the first history of the US that I’ve read that bothers to include ecology.’
‘…you might wonder how three books about the passenger pigeon could possibly have been published this year — and, iconic or not, what more could possibly be said about an extinct species one hundred years on? Yet each book brings something new to the table. But my favourite of this trio of passenger pigeon books is Mark Avery’s A Message from Martha: The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and its Relevance Today [Bloomsbury Natural History, 2014; Guardian bookshop; Amazon UK hardcover/paperback; Amazon US hardcover/kindle US].’
Book reviews are personal things. There is no reviewer who can tell you whether you will like or hate a book, only whether they did, and something about its style and content that will either whet your appetite or get you wrinkling up your nose. I know which of the three of this year’s books about Passenger Pigeons I like best – it’s mine! And it would be odd if it were otherwise – it would mean that I ought to have written a different book.
So when a reviewer says they like a book of mine I imagine that they are a person with whom I would get on, and whose company I would enjoy, because we seem to be on the same wavelength. And if a reviewer doesn’t like a book of mine then, honestly, I tend to shrug my shoulders and put it behind me as much as one can (but it does tend to gnaw away a little in the back of one’s head).
Click here to buy.
If you look long and hard enough most things have flaws which it can be entertaining and arguably justifiable to pick over for the sake of a well structured review with a varying dynamic. I have done it myself on occasion. The reading public is a far more transparent judge with no agenda or brief. I really enjoyed both of your books and a negative review wouldn’t make me doubt my own judgement.
As a writer, you have to take the rough with the smooth Mark…
Ed – indeed, and the smooth with the rough.
I have just finished reading A Message from Martha and I thoroughly enjoyed it (as I did Fighting for Birds) The mental picture that I now have of a mile wide “river” of Passenger Pigeons flying overhead, at 60mph, for hour after hour after hour will remain with me always when I think about extinctions.
Marta’s message is indeed a very sad and sobering message!
Roll on the next book
Delighted you had a positive review – you (and Martha) deserve it. I haven’t yet posted a review on Amazon but I will as soon as I can get round to it.