Category: Book review

I have reviewed 50 books on this blog this year – a wide-ranging varied selection including many high quality works. If you are looking for a Christmas present for a nature-loving naturalist then this list might give you some ideas and I’ve whittled it down to a shortlist of eight books that most impressed me…

Nicola Chester writes superbly well and has a close relationship with the natural world. This book takes the area around the author’s home, and where she grew up, and travels back to the 1940s, war time, to describe the rural community then. Much of the detail comes from the diaries of a woman farmer and…

The author and his partner settle in to living in northern Greece, near the borders with Albania and North Macedonia, and close to the two Prespa Lakes. Imagine Driving over Lemons with less driving, fewer lemons and a lot more wildlife. This book is a very good read partly because of the thoughtfulness of the…

The 429 spiders and 26 harvestmen species covered in this book form a significant proportion of the c700 spiders and 31 harvestmen in the UK which would have come as a surprise to Martin Lister who wrote the first book on English spiders which described 34 spiders and three harvestmen, opining that there was little…

I’ve been to Yellowstone twice and I’m so glad I’ve had that experience. The World’s first National Park and the home of Old Faithful, the Great Prismatic Spring, beautiful views, Grey Wolves, Brown Bears and quite a lot of controversy. This book is, as the title fairly suggests, a book about nature conservation in the…