Category: BOOK REVIEWS

This book was published last week and I’ve been giving it a close look. It does what you’d expect from its title and cover – it’s a photographic identification guide to lots and lots of insects (and a very few non-insect arthropods sneak in at pages 22-23 and 639 and following). The 3,000 species are…

This is a very interesting book and although I wouldn’t say it will have changed my life it has given my thinking a shove in a different direction, and I thank the author for that. What it has done is tell me a lot that I didn’t know, whet my appetite to know more and…

We’re pretty much accustomed to animals having evolved to lessen the chances that they might be eaten. Camouflage, tasting nasty, fighting back, vigilance, alarm calls and a long list of other traits and behaviours are parts of the evolutionary arms war between predators and prey. But what of diseases and parasites? How have, or even…

This is an interesting and attractive book which does, though, have one significant snag. I know the author and have worked with him, and so it’s not surprising that I warmed to the book immediately, and I’ve published with Thames & Hudson (Remarkable Birds) and it was such a pleasant experience that I was further…

Alan Stewart, a former wildlife crime officer in Tayside Police, has written widely about wildlife crime, in fiction and non-fiction. I have enjoyed his previous books and reviewed four of them here (2017, Killing by Proxy; 2021, Calls from the Wild;  2023, Cruel Intentions; 2024, The Peregrine Thief). This book is also about wildlife crime…

This is a very good read and I see it is long-listed for the Wainwright Conservation Prize. I wish it well, because it’s a good book, but it has about as much to do with conservation as it does with cricket. This is a book about carbon in many different guises. The author travels across…

I’m offered quite a few American books to review and sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. I’m so glad I did say yes to this one as it is a very well-written and interesting book about a general subject which is highly relevant to UK readers but a specific case study that is unfamiliar…

It is CPRE’s centenary and this is the second resulting book. The first was an attempt, partially successful I thought – click here, to look forward. This is an account of the past, and is an informative and interesting, and therefore successful, one. I don’t know that much about CPRE because it hasn’t cropped up…

I like Alastair Humphreys’s writing (see a review of a previous book – click here) and have signed up to some of his five newsletters (!) after reading this book and being reminded that I like his prose. The book is in three parts: The Great Disconnection (we’ve lost touch with nature); Fifteen Minutes of…

I’ve written a few books and it’s lovely to get feedback on them – especially positive feedback (but negative feedback sometimes makes me smile too!). Recently there has been a wave of positive feedback and offers of help. Emails, of various sorts have arrived to tell me how brilliantly well-written are my books (so true!),…