This is a finely produced and beautiful book about birds in history. Even if you didn’t read the words between the pictures you’d get a lot out of it. And, that was how I started with this book – I flicked through it, was caught up by an image, read the caption and then looked…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – Birding in an Age of Extinction by Martin Painter.
This is a good read if you are a birder or if you’ve ever chased after a rare bird anywhere in the world. The author has done a bit of that, with what appears to be the usual mixture of success and failure. He has travelled widely and visited such places as remote Norfolk Island…
Sunday book review – Wild Mull by Stephen Littlewood and Martin Jones
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This is a very attractive book which deals with a very attractive place which is rich in wildlife. If you are a naturalist visiting Mull then you should read this book, luxuriate in the images, imagine you’ll see all the wildlife and plan your trip ahead of setting off, and take the book with you…
Sunday book review – Lost Animals by Errol Fuller
This is a book of photographs of extinct species, so it’s a bit like looking through a very old family album whose subjects you’ve never met but with whom you feel somehow linked through time. All the species are either mammals or birds. Some of the photographs are of poor quality, and many are unsurprisingly…
Sunday book review – On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester
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This book, subtitled a memoir, is just that. It’s a series of remembrances of events, mostly to do with nature, place, and protest. I loved it. The ‘place’ is that area which includes the sites of the Greenham Common protest and the Newbury bypass protest. The author was involved in both of these, and the…
Sunday book review – Calls from the Wild by Alan Stewart
This is a crime novel – a wildlife crime novel – and the story skips along at a fair pace and made me want to keep turning the pages and discover what happened next. It’s not exactly a whodunnit, but more of a willtheygetdunforit. Alan Stewart is a prolific author on wildlife crime. As an…
Sunday book review – The Amazing Story of Montagu’s Harrier by Elvira Werkman
This is a fine book which I have enjoyed reading on my travels over the last few weeks. I knew I’d find it interesting because it deals with a couple of subjects which are really interesting scientifically and in terms of nature conservation; how wildlife fits in with modern agriculture and which part of a…
Sunday book review – Rebugging the Planet by Vicki Hird
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This book covers some of the same ground as last week’s reviewed book (Silent Earth by Dave Goulson) in that it is invertebrate-based, is on the side of the creepie-crawlies, explains their value to us and sets out some actions that all could take to help to make things right. This book is written in…
This was nice
Good morning Mark, Just writing to thank you for the excellent ‘A message from Martha‘ which I have just finished reading this morning (I know it’s been around a while – I’ve been busy!). I’ve never been particularly excited by pigeons – especially dead ones- but I was stirred to read your book partly by…
Sunday book review – Silent Earth by Dave Goulson
This is a very good book by an expert. For those of us whose knowledge and understanding of the natural world is highly slanted towards feathered vertebrates this book helps to put things in perspective. The argument is that we need insects, and if we don’t look after them there will be consequences for us….