Category: BOOK REVIEWS

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!),…

I’ve never been to Italy despite the food and the culture, and that is partly because I was rather of the mind that it wasn’t a great place for wildlife. I think that may have been based on an overly bird-centric view of wildlife as Spain, Greece and the former Yugoslavia exert stronger pulls for…

The author worked in my directorate at the RSPB for many years and so I know him and I know he knows this subject well. I didn’t know that he could write as well as he does here, though. Simon admits to being a town planner in his first words in this book and he…

The author spends a spring and summer trying to see all the butterflies that occur in Denmark. She doesn’t seem to know quite why she wants to do this but she does. And she starts from a position of a great deal of ignorance about the 60+ species on her must-see list. The butterflies of…

This is a fascinating account of the wonders of the Pacific kelp forests that run from Baja California to Alaska (and in the southern hemisphere off Chile). Like many of the world’s other great habitats, this one is under threat but we hear of a motley, diverse group of individuals who are doing their best…

I wish this book had been available through 2025 when I was carrying out a year-long bioblitz of my garden. The Diptera is a very species-rich taxon, perhaps even richer than Coleoptera in world terms, and there are over 7000 UK species.  I found them difficult to catch, difficult to photograph and then difficult to…