Category: Review (Page 103 of 133)

The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There have always been apparitions on the tube, faces on the other side of the window alongside yours, momentary glimpses into another world were enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Just recently, however, there has been a proliferation of sightings on the Metropolitan Line and these spirits are really starting to scare people. The only people in the Metropolitan Police that can deal with this are the Special Assessment Unit a.k.a. The Folly, so Peter Grant is despatched along with Jaget Kumar from the British Transport Police to suffer the perils of the rush hour and to find out what has spooked the ghosts.

Abigail, Peter’s cousin has started turning up to the Folly and as she is showing potential for magical things, Nightingale takes it upon himself to train her as well. There is the possibility that a new River God has turned up, but as he is very young, Peter needs Beverly to come and see him, they form an instant bond and surprise the older couple looking after him as they vanish in the river. As they close in on the reason that the ghosts are agitated, the search takes on a new urgency when they realise that someone may be in danger and they are fast running out of time.

This is a really good novella that slots into the fantastic Rivers of London Series. Written with the same humour and wit as the previous ones it fills in more detail to the characters of Grant and Nightingale as well as introducing Abigale for the first time. It was nice to see Nightingales’ play a larger part in this as he has always been in the shadow of Grant to a certain extent. If it had one flaw, it is way too short; but it was great to see that there is book seven coming next year. 4.5 stars

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Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us by David A. Neiwert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Intelligence is not a trait solely linked to humans, it is present across the whole animal kingdom. Some of the mammals with the highest intellect are the cetaceans, in particular dolphins and Killer Whales. Better known as the Orca, these beautiful creatures have been tormented and persecuted by us for a long time, but things are changing as we learn more about their amazing abilities. It was known that they travel around in small family pods, but it has only recently been discovered that there are several sub-species of orca. Each of these sub-species has developed their own language and culture, have astonishing echolocation and form lifelong bonds.

In the wild they are ruthless hunters, they have developed sophisticated hunting techniques for a particular prey. For example orca in one part of the world will eat fish, they have a penchant for salmon and in other parts of the wild, they hunt seals, seabirds and even moose. Yet they are gentle and kind with there being almost no known incidents of people being killed in the wild. There have been a few deaths, but these have happened in places where they have been held captive. There is a large chapter on those orcas that have been taken from the wild and held in captivity; holding a creature as magnificent as this in a concrete tank is equally cruel and unnecessary.

This is a fascinating book on these awesome creatures. Neiwert clearly explains the latest research and explores the myths and legends associated with them, as well as information on the perilous state that they are in because of our scant concern for the environment. There are some heart-stopping and wondrous moments he has experienced with them whilst bobbing around in his kayak in the ocean near his home. It is a thoroughly enjoyable book on these stunning whales.

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An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mendelsohn has been passionate about the classics, so much so that it is he teaches it at Bard College. One year his eighty-one-year-old father, Jay, decides that he will sign up and join the young people learning about this epic tale for the first time. Jay is a retired research scientist who was a maths expert but realises that this is his one last chance to discover about the great literature of the world, something that he didn’t do when he was being educated. So, begins an emotional adventure that they both undertake, as they teach the students and learn about each others perception of the tale and Mendelsohn peers through the chinks in the armour to see the secrets that his dad has not spoken about all his life. This journey into the book inspires them to take a cruise around the Mediterranean where they visit the places mentioned in the book, and it gave Mendelsohn a collection of memories that he will treasure forever.

It is a touching memoir of Jay Mendelsohn and Daniel Mendelsohn and their relationship that was straightforward and complex at the same time. As he works his way through the Odyssey, he draws parallels between that and his own life journey with his parents and his father in particular. He is open with his relationship that he has had with his father and takes time to be open and explain details as the discovery of things that were to clarify what made his father the way he was. One challenging part of the book was was that I have never read the Odyssey, so this book was a voyage of discovery in certain ways for me. It is a book that has never crossed my radar before but might give it a go one day. Worth reading for those that was a different take on a family memoir.

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Five Fields by Gillian Clarke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t read as much poetry as I feel that I should do, and when an artist who follows me on Twitter recommended this poet and my library had a copy, I’d thought that I would have nothing to lose. From what I can gather Clarke usually draws inspiration for her prose from the Welsh landscape and there are elements of this in the collection. However, in here, she has taken a wider brief and looked to the city as an extra source as well as from other countries.

We kept one bottle longer than the rest,
Forgot it in the back of the cupboard,
And found it, tiding up, uncorked it,
And wondered at the taste of shadows in it

There are some lovely poems in here, and I particularly liked The Honey Man, Little Owls, Sloes Light and Seeing Angels. Some of my favourite poems were those touching on the natural world, especially those rooted in her home country. There were others that I liked a lot, but there were a number I found harder to fathom, but that is as much my fault as they do need to be read and read to sink in. There is some lovely prose in here and will definitely be reading more of her work.

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Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires by Dominic Ziegler
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Black Dragon River has a long history, reaching as far back as Genghis Khan and the Mongolian empire around 1000 years ago. This was the beginning of its tumultuous history of conflict and war that has lasted pretty much until the present day. Also called the Amur, it is a river that I had never heard of until I picked this book up. Turns out it is the world’s ninth longest and forms part of the border between Russia and China and has been a focal point for each country’s expansion plans over the years. It has seen more than it fair share of death and destruction from both sides

Ziegler begins his journey along the river as Khan would have done, on a horse, from the Mongolian steppe into the taiga to what is thought to be the source of the river. His journey along the river is not always easy so he is forced to take the Trans-Siberian Railway through a valley of water meadows. He does return to the river and the people and places along it, but it almost seems to be a aside. I was hoping this was going to be a fascinating travel book about a relatively unknown part of the world, but sadly there was much more history than travel, and this is a place that has had a lot of brutal events happen. Not bad, but not great.

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Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain by James Canton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The UK has a long history of human occupation. Taking a walk in the town or countryside will reveal traces of the past in the lumps and bumps of the fields and the streets of a city that show an earlier layout. You can tread the same paths as people have walked for millennia, across the ridgeways of the chalk downs and through sunken holloways. The ancient world does give up its secrets easily, it normally involves careful study of a site, whilst considering it within the context of the wider landscape. Sifting the evidence often involves moving large amounts of soil to get an insight to how things were.

Even then, some things will always remain a mystery as Canton discovers when he visits a stone in the very north of Scotland. This stone has writing on that no one has been able to decipher and it is thought that no one ever will. This minor setback aside, it was still a place that oozed character and antiquity and fuelled his obsession with the traces of the past. He is driven to find the answers to various questions that he has wondered about, to go to the places that our ancestors inhabited and to hold the things that they have made. His wanderings will take him out on a small boat to float over Doggerland, a place that lives just below the waves of the North Sea, learns how to knap flint, undertakes an ambitious walk along the Peddars Way and searches for an elusive section of Roman road near where he lives. There is an inevitable trip to Stonehenge and the revelation that ancient Britons also mummified the deceased. Canton is lucky enough to get to hold a couple of nuggets of Irish and Cornish gold that was shipped back and forwards across the Irish Sea and to see the astonishing quality of the fabulous sun discs made by craftsmen thousands of years ago.

The ancient world has always fascinated me and where I live in Dorset I am fortunate to have a proliferation of barrows, hill forts and henges nearby to get my fix of prehistoric history; just like James Canton has to. What comes across in this book is his infectious enthusiasm for the past and a desire to go and experience these activities and places for himself. The prose is full of wry observations as he takes us on his discoveries to meet those engaging with our ancestors and the techniques they used to make objects that were significant or precious in some way. I liked the underlying and subtle humour and the images chosen at the beginning of each chapter fitted well. It was just a pleasure to read and hopefully, it will inspire those that read it to discover the prehistoric landscape in their local area.

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Wonderland: A Year of Britain’s Wildlife, Day by Day by Brett Westwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

We are used to hearing horror stories of the dramatic decline in our wildlife and the daily persecution that they suffer, but if you know where and more importantly when to look, we still have an amazing abundance of flora and fauna to see. Drawing on two lifetimes experience, naturalists Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss take us on a daily journey into the natural world. No stone has been left unturned as we find the creatures of moor and mountain, stream and river, field and dale and more importantly those that you might see when you look out of your kitchen window. They write about all sorts of creatures too, from the smallest flies that you can only find on particular plants, the majestic eagles you can see on the West Coast of Scotland and the fleeting visitors as they pause briefly here on their epic journeys.

As I have come to expect from Stephen Moss the writing is excellent; it is detailed whilst still being interesting. Haven’t read anything by Brett Westwood before, but have been listening to his Natural Histories on Radio 4 a lot recently and have come to like the enthusiasm for his subjects be they slugs or owls. They are an ideal partnership and this is one of the things that makes this book so special and a veritable goldmine of the natural world. Will definitely be buying this in paperback when it comes out.

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The Secret Life of the Owl by John Lewis-Stempel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Birds of prey have always fascinated me, they are the pinnacle of evolution as predators and have honed their techniques to maximise their efficiency. A glimpse of one is always special, whether it is a pair of buzzards wheeling on the thermals, a kestrel hovering over a motorway verge or the stoop of the feathered exocet that is the peregrine. I have only ever seen one owl in the wild though; just after dusk this shadow dropped off a tree from the woods near my back garden and glided close over my head. It was an unnerving experience.

Nocturnal creatures have always had an element of enchantment about them with their ability to move in almost total darkness. Those that fly, like bats and owls, can seem almost magical. Their special qualities have captivated mankind for millennia, and there are traces of owls in cultures going back as far as the Stone Age. Their rounded faces with the penetrating gaze have made us consider them as wise creatures but their night activities meant that some thought they were bearers of omens and messages from the other side. The legends that they have inspired are only equalled by their actual abilities; some species can rotate their head almost all the way round, some can hover, others can fly completely silently,

I see him. Just a leaf blown through the pillars of the autumn oaks

John Lewis-Stempel is one of our current crop of writers that have taken the mantle of nature writing from luminaries of the genre such as J.A. Baker and Roger Deakin and made it their own. Lewis-Stempel has drawn on the prose and poetry from a variety of sources to shine a light on the elusive owl as well as drawing on personal experience of the owls that inhabit his land in Herefordshire. I could read John Lewis-Stempel’s prose all day and this is almost perfect with just one tiny flaw; it is too short! This is a lovely addition to my natural history library. 4.5 stars

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Land of Plenty: A Journey Through the Fields and Foods of Modern Britain by Charlie Pye-Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

When people think of farming though they tend to have a rose-tinted image of farmers and those that till the soil, seeing the fields of corn waving in the breeze and the farmer leaning over the gate looking at a field of cows. Most of us would need to go back several generations to find family members who worked as farm labourers, so our disconnect from the land that feeds us is more or less complete. And yet we have shaped the very landscape around us for the past five thousand years and one of the primary reasons behind this was to provide food for people to eat. These days though we have a split population; the majority have no clue where their foods originate from as they obtain all of it in packets from the supermarket and there is a minority who are fully aware of the source of their Sunday roast and may even know what its name was…

Charlie Pye-Smith took a year travelling around the country in a motorhome to take the pulse of British farming. He meets with producers large and small, those who have farmed that patch for generations, new people who are driven by an ideal to produce better food and talks with the owners of some of the largest farms in the UK. The way that some of these people produce our cupboard staples, milk, bread, meats and drinks are all examined under his careful gaze. There is a critique of the system, that is allegedly driven by the consumer, but is actually controlled by the supermarket giants and how farmers are having to diversify just to keep their heads above water financially.

We are supposedly nine meals from a breakdown in society, so we all have a critical interest in the way that our food is produced. Pye-Smith’s book does pass a sympathetic but critical eye over the process and actually meet the people who herd the sheep, make cider, grow hundreds of tonnes of potatoes and milk the cows. There are discussions about the Common Agricultural Policy that has provided subsidies and in some cases financial lifelines to farmers. He does touch briefly on the sustainability of the industry, but there was very little on the environmental havoc the industrial style of farming has wreaked in the pursuit of the lowest price and greatest profit. This is still a book that deserves a wider audience because of the subject matter, partly as people are far more interested in what they put in their mouths nowadays. It should also be used to open the debate about the food industry especially with the growing uncertainty in a post-Brexit Britain and all that entails.

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As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Birds & Books by Alex Preston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

It was Alex Preston’s Aunt that foster his love of the natural world and birds in particular. But in his teenage years, skateboarding and listening to Niverna was considered much cooler by his peers than being stuck in a draughty hide. This passion was suppressed but it never went away. Instead, Preston was drawn into an avian world between the covers of books where the poetry and writings from luminaries such as Dillard and Fiennes, Hardy and Hughes. It took another decade and a half for him to feel comfortable in the things that he wanted to do and this reignited his desire to watch birds again.

Taking us through twenty-one birds as exotic as the blue streak that is the kingfisher and the inspiration for the title of the book, the tiny wren, and the speed of the swifts, Preston extols the virtues of each, weaving in poetry and prose taken from the books that made an impact as he grew up. There are personal stories too, his father with cancer, being alone deep into Russia and his wedding in December. All of these memories are written with a stark honesty.

Each of the twenty-one chapters is fronted by a breath-taking image created by the graphic artist Neil Gower. These full sizes colour plates show the bird is a typical scene, a peregrine in a stoop, the murmurations of the starlings, Skylarks float over golden fields and the silence of the barn owl. Scattered throughout are black and white sketches of the birds and other objects, even the endpapers are a thing of beauty; the kingfishers that make up the pattern are caught by Gower in that moment as they dive to fish. Whilst I have read some of the books that he mentions in the text I now have a longer list of items that I want to read. Preston has got to the very essence of what makes the natural world and birds in particular necessary to make ourselves whole. The book is so well produced, with its spectacular cover, high quality pages and tactile binding. It is a joy to hold and a delight to read.

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