This is a heavily revised and expanded English translation of a book published in Icelandic in 2020. The translator, Anna Yates, is to be thanked, along with the author and publisher, for making such an interesting book accessible to English readers. I’m interested in extinction and the Great Auk is a famous extinction. Of course,…
Category: Book review
Sunday book review – The Lie of the Land by Guy Shrubsole
This is Guy Shrubsole’s best book yet, despite the success of his excellent Who Owns England (reviewed here) and his book about soggy, slippery woods, The Lost Rainforests of Britain (reviewed here) because this book is about everything! It covers a lot of ground, all of it, because it is about land use and who…
Sunday book review – The Volunteers by Carol Donaldson
This is the story of the relationships between the author and a team of conservation volunteers. It is a tender account of those relationships and has some very, very well-written and moving passages. I liked it a lot. However, although these are conservation volunteers, nature is the backdrop to this book rather than a leading…
Sunday book review – Enjoying Birdwatching in Lancashire and Cumbria by David Hindle
I wrote the foreword for this book (the author must have caught me on a good day) but it was published last year so I have been rather dilatory in giving it the little breath of publicity here that it most certainly deserves. The title is self-explanatory but few vaguely similar regional books use the…
Mid-week book review – Stoats, Weasels, Martens and Polecats by Jenny Macpherson
This is a very interesting book about a very few species and a very good New Naturalist. The New Naturalist series put out some rather unattractive books a while ago with terribly reproduced and somewhat irrelevant images. Those days have certainly passed. This is a well-produced volume with good photographs, graphs and figures. The author…