Sunday book review – Birdmania by Bernd Brunner

 

This book is really quite annoying. It’s annoying because it has some really good parts but it lacks structure of any sort.

Most sentences are perfect but many paragraphs are a collection of sentences that are poorly linked together. I often got to the end of a paragraph and went back to try to see what it was about. And many chapters are collections of rather badly connected paragraphs. The author’s first language is German but I don’t think that is the problem – the translation feels perfectly professional.

Maybe it shouldn’t worry me – but it did. Well, as I say, it irritated me a lot. Because the writing got in the way of enjoying occasional fine passages and some interesting facts.

This is a collection of stories, anecdotes and historical accounts of people who interacted with birds in lots of different ways. The artwork is a mixture of the very attractive and the fairly attractive – and mostly of old drawings and paintings (out of copyright I guess).  These illustrations add quite a lot to the look and the feel of the text although many of them seem rather random choices.  The text is commendably wide in its reach and brought some new names to my notice, probably because I am largely trapped in the literature in English, and for that I am grateful.

Disappointing.

 

Birdmania: a remarkable passion for birds by Bernd Brunner is published by Greystone Books.

 

Behind More Binoculars by Keith Betton and Mark Avery is now published (by Pelagic). Here’s a very kind review of it. You can still buy it directly from Pelagic with a 30% discount using the code BMB30 – but only until the end of November.

 

 

 

[registration_form]