James Rebanks’s earlier book, The Shepherd’s Life (reviewed here), was a great read despite being very irritating in many places. I made it this blog’s book of the year in 2015 and, rather more importantly for the author and publisher, it was a best-seller. This book is less irritating but is still a great read….
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
Sunday book review – Britain’s Orchids by Sean Cole and Mike Waller
I’m rubbish at plants so I don’t know how much I will use this book, but I’m interested in books on natural history and I can see that this is a high-grade piece of work. This is another Princeton University Press/WildGuides field guide and they are almost always clear, well-designed and written by experts (see…
Sunday book review – A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough
I’ve sat in audiences and listened to David Attenborough, I’ve talked to him, briefly, with others, and, like you, I’ve watched him and listened to him on television. He once phoned me at the RSPB and as Claire, my PA, said ‘It’s David Attenborough on the phone’ my brain thought ‘But I need to be…
Sunday book review – the Hedgehog Book by Hugh Warwick
This is a charming book about a species that is being lost from our lives. I haven’t seen a live Hedgehog for several years and there aren’t many squashed on the roads around here these days. Friends and family send videos of hedgehogs if they come across one – this once common species is now…
Sunday book review – A Bird A Day by Dominic Couzens
You can’t go wrong if you slap a gorgeous Audubon on the front of your book and this Arctic Tern is one of my favourites (see p77 Remarkable Birds, which also has an Audubon on its cover). It’s a good start and there are more Audubons sprinkled through the 368 pages of this attractive and…
Mark Avery is not yet reading…
I have a pile of books to review as lots of publishers delayed publication until September and so there is now a flood. There will be two books reviewed on this blog on Sunday to enable me to keep my head above the rising tide; Dominic Couzens’s A Bird a Day and Hugh Warwick’s The…
Sunday book review – Bringing Back the Beaver by Derek Gow
Derek Gow is sometimes described as a force of nature, and this book demonstrates that he most certainly is a force for nature. It’s a good read – very entertaining, very informative and the views of someone who knows what’s what. It is an entertaining book – there are lots of stories about who did…
Sunday book review – Net Zero by Dieter Helm
This book arrived in the post out of the blue from the publisher, probably because they had spotted that I have favourably reviewed two previous books by Prof Helm, Natural Capital and Green and Prosperous Land, and they were right to bank on my admiration of this further volume. It contains the same mixture of…
Sunday book review – The Consolation of Nature by Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott and Peter Marren
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It was the best of times (the most glorious spring ever), it was the worst of times (a tiny virus had cut us off from normal life) but these tales of three naturalists capture the contradiction that many of us experienced. Were we allowed to enjoy ourselves when hundreds were dying? Was it OK to…
Congratulations!
Congratulations to Benedict Macdonald and Dara McAnulty for winning their categories of the Wainwright Prize. Ben’s book, Rebirding, won the new category for global conservation. Dara’s book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, won the category for UK nature writing.