This is the second of John D. Burns’s books I have reviewed here, but whereas Sky Dance was fictional (although it read pretty true to life to me) this is a story of walks by the author, sometimes with friends, in the mountains of Scotland, in winter. I’m going to read his other two books…
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – Women on Nature edited by Katharine Norbury
Anthologies are always worth a look because, at the very least, you can rely on the compiler to have done a lot of work in sifting and selecting and, yes, discarding, to arrive at their final selection. And this is quite a tome with 400+ pages of selections and another 50+ pages of notes and…
Sunday book review – Beak, Tooth and Claw by Mary Colwell
I have found this book a difficult one to review because I like and admire the author but I dislike and don’t admire the book. What follows is a review of the book, not of the author. It’s a book about predators in the UK – so raptors, Red Foxes, Badgers, seals get lots of…
Sunday book review – Much Ado About Mothing by James Lowen
I’m not much of a naturalist, just a half-decent birder and formerly a better than half-decent ornithologist, and so I walk around the natural world missing most things. Birds are easy, even if you don’t look at them they shout, beautifully, at you. Butterflies are great, partly because they are fairly manageable in numbers, but…
This blog (5) – book reviews
No book review today, but they will continue on this site on Sunday mornings. I’m reading two books at the moment and one of them will be reviewed next Sunday. Since 2012 I have reviewed (with some help from others, particularly Ian Carter) c250 books, almost all books with strong natural history content. You will…
Sunday book review – Butterflies by Martin Warren
Arguably, there are too many natural history books published these days – but this isn’t one of the surplus. This is an excellent read and packed full of information from an acknowledged expert of many years standing. Martin Warren is the former Chief Executive of Butterfly Conservation (I was actually on the interview panel which…
Sunday book review – Gone by Michael Blencowe
This is a book about extinct animals – I’m personally interested in extinctions and so I thought I might enjoy this book, but, obviously it would depend on the way the author handled the subject and the quality of the writing. I did enjoy this book. Eleven species are given their own chapters; two mammals…
Sunday book review – The Oak Papers by James Canton
I came across this book when it was reviewed by the incomparable John Riutta – it seems odd to learn of a book about an oak tree in Essex from a resident of Oregon, but there you go! And after my mention of it here on a Sunday I was most impressed that someone in…
Sunday book review – Out and About, Discovering British Wild Flowers by Deidre Shirreffs
This is a book allegedly aimed at 6-12 year olds but I found it suited me fine. Each year I tell myself, with less and less conviction each year, that I’ll learn a few more plants and I try, but somehow each Spring finds me re-learning the same species over again. This simple photographic guide…
Sunday book review – Birds of Lincolnshire, by Lincolnshire Bird Club
If you live in Lincolnshire you will want to own this book and it will be an invaluable reference source for your everyday birding for years to come. This volume follows a 1989 predecessor, and much has changed and occurred in the last 30+ years. It appears that this book was conceived as a way…