Standing up for Nature
This is the story of the relationships between the author and a team of conservation volunteers. It is a tender account of those relationships and has some very, very well-written and moving passages. I liked it a lot. However, although these are conservation volunteers, nature is the backdrop to this book rather than a leading…
I wrote the foreword for this book (the author must have caught me on a good day) but it was published last year so I have been rather dilatory in giving it the little breath of publicity here that it most certainly deserves. The title is self-explanatory but few vaguely similar regional books use the…
This is a very interesting book about a very few species and a very good New Naturalist. The New Naturalist series put out some rather unattractive books a while ago with terribly reproduced and somewhat irrelevant images. Those days have certainly passed. This is a well-produced volume with good photographs, graphs and figures. The author…
Another novel about the murky upland world of somewhere near you? Badgers, grouse moors, lords, rich businessmen, snares, machetes, rifles, Hen Harriers, modern slavery and so much more. It’s a good follow-up to Bob’s previous novel Snared (see review here). If you enjoyed Snared then I’m sure you’ll enjoy this too. And, just like Snared,…
This book, out of 52 I reviewed in 2024, was my choice of wildlife book of the year – I recommend it highly. You can buy this book from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will…
An interesting read – perhaps more so for those of us who have lived through the whole of this period than youngsters – but maybe not. I got on much better with this book from the moment I decided not to take it too seriously but just enjoy the ride. There is something a bit…
This is the second edition of the 2007 title. The poignant thing about this book is that the senior author, John Clarkson, passed away in 2023 and this edition thus stands as memorial to him as well as a fine book about one part of one English county. I used to think that Lincolnshire was…
This is a thoughtful and stimulating read. I enjoyed it very much. The book is about how the world used to be, ecologically. We travel back in time through the author’s narrative to a few decades ago, or a few centuries or many tens of millions of years. And we travel in space, around the…
You should take it as a measure of my fairness that even though I think large parts of this book are poorly argued (hardly argued at all, really) I believe that it is so wonderfully well written, and so exquisitely irritating, that it will certainly be vying for my book of the year for 2024….
This book is one of a series of Little Books which are little books but they pack a big punch. They will remind many readers of Observer books because they are a similar size, but don’t let the small dimensions make you think that these books are lightweights. Not at all. This volume deals with…