Standing up for Nature
I liked this book very much. It is written by someone about my age (slightly older) who has travelled to many of the same places as I have at similar times of his life but I don’t think you would have to have been in Oxford, the Camargue or the Coto Donana at those times…
I’m not a massive supporter of the cult of youth as I feel it’s a stage of life that is best grown out of. But this book, from this young (early 30s) man, is a joy. Really! The author is enthusiastic about his job as a ranger at the National Trust’s site of Wicken Fen…
This book persuaded me to be interested in something in which I didn’t think I wanted to be interested. That’s an achievement for any author – to engage the initially uninterested. And Jeff Ollerton does it through a mixture of his own enthusiasm, very clear explanation of some fairly complex (but beautifully complex) biology…
This is a lovely book, filled with an appealing mixture of wisdom, humour, nostalgia, stories, facts, speculation and common sense. It’s about birdwatching, very much birdwatching, and not just birding, for Rob Hume has watched many birds and thought about what he was seeing and, it seems, enjoyed most of it immensely. In a mixture…
I’m not a great fan of economics because it always seems to explain things in retrospect rather than predict them in prospect but you can write that off as hauteur from one trained as a scientist if you like. But I always like Dieter Helm’s books and in 2019 I chose his Green and Prosperous…