This book is about a bird which seems to be trying quite hard to go extinct but which was, about a century ago, a very familiar part of the countryside throughout the UK. The Corncrake is a bird that once lived in long grass and other dense vegetation right across Europe and into Asia…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – After They’re Gone by Peter Marren
Peter Marren is friend of mine (although I haven’t clapped eyes on him for ages) and I have favourably reviewed several of his books here in the past (The Consolation of Nature, with Jeremy Mynott and Michael McCarthy, Chasing the Ghost, Where the Wild Thyme Blew, Rainbow Dust) and so it might not come as…
Sunday book review – Field Guide to Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises by Mark Carwardine
I went to a talk at the 2018 Bird Fair by the author when he talked about the preparation of this book – and now here it is. It’s a fine field guide. And it really is a field guide – a slim volume that can easily be pocketed in a coat and brought out…
Sunday book review – Peak District by Penny Anderson
This is a standard New Naturalist – a series of books that doesn’t feel very new, or at all ground-breaking these days. Penny Anderson gives a workpersonlike account of the wildlife and ecology of this area, mostly a National Park, and the habitats it includes. There is mention of raptor persecution. Hen Harrier appears in…
Sunday book review – Children of the Anthropocene by Bella Lack
This is a book written by an 18-year-old environmentalist – and it’s being reviewed here by a 64-year-old environmentalist. Forty-six years ago there weren’t books of this sort written by undergraduates and I’m very glad that I didn’t have one published then because I suspect that it would be an embarrassing read with the benefit…
Sunday book review – In Search of One Last Song by Patrick Galbraith
This book, out of 55 I reviewed in 2022, was the title I chose as my 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…
Sunday book review – Saving Eden by Kevin Corcoran
I hadn’t heard of The Gearagh until I received this book. I can be forgiven for that, perhaps, because it is in Ireland and essentially this superb site for wildlife was destroyed a few years before I was born, in the 1950s. This book describes what we lost and how we lost it. The Gearagh…
Published today – The Trespasser’s Companion by Nick Hayes
This is a follow-up to the same author’s Book of Trespass from 2020 – see review here – and just as I loved the first book I love this one too. Perhaps even more so. It’s a book with attitude, and I like that. I also agree with a great deal of it, although even…
Sunday book review – Thin Places by Kerri ni Dochartaigh
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This is another book published last year, which I missed even though I knew it was coming. If the name of the author rings a faint bell with readers of this blog then it is because she won a little writing competition held here in December 2016. This is an immensely powerful book. I couldn’t…
Sunday book review – When There Were Birds by Roy and Lesley Adkins
This book is described by its publisher, on the jacket flap, as a social history of Britain that charts the complex connections between birds and people, and in a way it is. But if it were that, I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it quite as much as I did. For me, this is…