Category: BOOK REVIEWS

Sunday book review – Ponds, Pools and Puddles by Jeremy Biggs and Penny Williams

Mark Comments Off on Sunday book review – Ponds, Pools and Puddles by Jeremy Biggs and Penny Williams

Every new New Naturalist is worth a look and this one is a hefty 614 pages of information, illustrations, photographs and graphs about smallish waterbodies, written by two acknowledged experts. It has to be said that the New Naturalists have regained their ability to produce well-illustrated books with clear colour photographs and fairly clear graphs…

Sunday book review – The Vanishing Mew Gull by Ray Reedman

Mark Comments Off on Sunday book review – The Vanishing Mew Gull by Ray Reedman

I have to admire the author for bringing together a taxonomic list of 1100 birds found in the Western Palearctic (about 1 in 10 of the world’s birds) and explaining the origins of their English vernacular names and scientific names. If that is the book you want, then this is the book for you. I…

Sunday book review – The Little Book of Beetles by Arthur V. Evans

Mark Comments Off on Sunday book review – The Little Book of Beetles by Arthur V. Evans

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 (I will…

Sunday book review – The Little Book of Trees by Herman Shugart and Peter White

Mark Comments Off on Sunday book review – The Little Book of Trees by Herman Shugart and Peter White

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 (I will…

Sunday book review – Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie

Mark Comments Off on Sunday book review – Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie

This is a very good book and a much needed antidote to the confident prognostications of doom and gloom. Sometimes I think it is slightly over optimistic, because the future does strike me as pretty worrying, but without hope for a better, or at least less apocalyptic, future, then there is little incentive to take…

Sunday book review – Another England by Caroline Lucas

Mark Comments Off on Sunday book review – Another England by Caroline Lucas

  It’s difficult being English, and Caroline Lucas has written a helpful book for the English to find their way and for the Irish, Welsh and Scots to cut us all a bit of slack. Being English is not necessarily being a racist skinhead with a cross of St George tattoo.  What is the left…

Sunday book review – The Little Book of Butterflies by Andrei and Alexandra Sourakov

Mark Comments Off on Sunday book review – The Little Book of Butterflies by Andrei and Alexandra Sourakov

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 (I will…

Sunday book review – Cairn by Kathleen Jamie

Mark 4 Comments

  Kathleen Jamie is Scotland’s National Poet or Makar, and this book is a collection of personal notes, prose poems, micro-essays and fragments. The idea is that they are arranged here like the stones of a cairn.  I was slightly nervous that this might be too ‘literary’ for me – but it wasn’t. Here are…