Category: BOOK REVIEWS

Sunday book review – Spiders and Harvestmen of Yorkshire by Richard I. Wilson.

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The 429 spiders and 26 harvestmen species covered in this book form a significant proportion of the c700 spiders and 31 harvestmen in the UK which would have come as a surprise to Martin Lister who wrote the first book on English spiders which described 34 spiders and three harvestmen, opining that there was little…

Sunday book review – Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone by Robert B. Keitle

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I’ve been to Yellowstone twice and I’m so glad I’ve had that experience. The World’s first National Park and the home of Old Faithful, the Great Prismatic Spring, beautiful views, Grey Wolves, Brown Bears and quite a lot of controversy. This book is, as the title fairly suggests, a book about nature conservation in the…

Sunday book review – The Birds of Bedfordshire by Tony Ploszajski

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This new county avifauna is a lovely book considering that Bedfordshire, like my adopted home county of Northamptonshire, is land-locked and, in many ways, is an unspectacular county for birds. But there are birds everywhere and their numbers change for a wide variety of reasons so every county avifauna is full of information destined to…

Sunday book review – The Breath of the Gods by Simon Winchester

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I was reading this book when Storm Melissa hit Jamaica and that was a timely reminder of the destructive power of winds. In this book I learned that some parts of the world may be losing their winds and there is also concern about Global Stilling. There was lots to interest me in these pages…

Sunday book review – Endemic by James Harding-Morris

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Endemic species are those found (in the wild) only in a particular area, so Britain’s endemic species are those found in Britain and nowhere else (in the wild at least). Such species are interesting as indicators of the workings of evolution since the last ice age and are ones whose futures lie entirely in our…

Sunday book review – The Book of Bogs edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw

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This book grew locally in West Yorkshire in response to Walshaw Moor’s landscape and wildlife and to the threat to it from a proposal to build an enormous windfarm on its deep peat soils. But although many of the writings collected here, some previously published elsewhere, relate to this moor, most famously the Wuthering Heights…

Sunday book review – The Highland Cow and the Horse of the Woods by Roy Dennis

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This is the latest wonderful book by the wonderful Roy Dennis. I have reviewed three of them here; Cottongrass Summer (my book of the year in 2020, click here), Restoring the Wild (click here for review) and Mistletoe Winter (shortlisted as a book of the year for 2021 (click here)). I reckon this book is…

Sunday book review – Just Earth by Tony Juniper

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Tony Juniper is arguably the leading UK environmentalist of his generation so his latest title raises hopes and expectations. This is, in my opinion, his best book and provides a detailed analysis of our failure to make enough progress with environmental issues such as biodiversity loss and climate change. He provides a compelling argument for…

Sunday book review – Life Changing by David North

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This is a gorgeous book – the most gorgeous book that I have read this year. David North and the design team at Mascot Media are to be congratulated on the sheer beauty of what they have produced. Cley and Salthouse marshes are on the north Norfolk Coast at its northernmost point and have long…

Sunday book review – Forgotten Forests by Jonathan Mullard

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I’ve been meaning to review this book for weeks as I’ve had it on my desk for what seems an age. I don’t know why I didn’t get round to it earlier but I’m glad I finally did because I enjoyed it very much. We are taken in a dozen chronological chapters from the end…