Standing up for Nature
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…
I have reviewed two of Derek Gow’s earlier books (Bringing Back the Beaver, September 2020; Birds, Beasts and Bedlam, July 2022) and both were very good books, but this is by some way a better book than either of those, which, to me, makes it an excellent book. You don’t have to be mad keen…
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…
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…