This is a redemptive story – of how the author recovered from a pit of despond and how nature helped him to make that transition. Chapter 1 is very moving and although getting the low-down on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Generalised Anxiety Disorder may not sound like a rattling good yarn it is a good read.
The message is that nature, and becoming more connected to the natural world, helped the author enormously and that nature is probably helping, and could in future help, many others too.
It’s a very personal tale but I am pretty sure that it will be relevant to many others and interesting to an even wider circle.
Writing this book will have been part of a healing process for the author – it feels like that as one reads it. And so there is a tendency to give him the benefit of the doubt and praise it to the heavens. But just because the author had a tough time, and is writing a moving personal narrative, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should all rush to buy and read it. But actually, the thing is, it is a good read. I enjoyed it and found myself cheering Joe along whenever he wrote about his happiness and connection with nature (mostly birds).
The tips and thoughts on how to get into birding and the author’s ‘five ways to well-birding’ ring bells with me. Actually, I found myself thinking, ‘Yep, that’s what I do’ quite often, and that made me wonder whether those with a different attitude to birding get as much out of the whole activity as Joe does, and as I think I do. It made me wonder who, amongst those I know, has the highest number of ways to unwell-birding – and that was quite a productive line of thought for me
The author’s writing style jarred with me in just a few places but that is totally a matter of taste – you may love the passages at which I turned up my nose a little. I do think this is a good book and, as Chris Packham writes in the foreword, an important book. It may well pull a few people back from the brink described in its Chapter 1 – and that would be marvellous. But it is also a good read.
Bird Therapy by Joe Harkness will be published by Unbound on 13 June.
Inglorious: conflict in the uplands by Mark Avery is published by Bloomsbury – for reviews see here.
Remarkable Birds by Mark Avery is published by Thames and Hudson – for reviews see here.
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