Category: Review (Page 23 of 132)

4 out of 5 stars

In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was aiming to seek asylum in Australia but first he had to get there. The book opens with him in a truck on the way to a boat that he hopes will take him there. He knew of the stories of boats that were not seaworthy and would sink on the journey over. But he never thought it would happen to him. It did. The story of the boat he is on sinking is terrifying enough, but he is one of the fortunate ones to be plucked from the ocean to safety.

The waves have freed us from their clutches /
The waves have spared our lives /
I laugh at them /
I laugh in triumph /
Laugh to express the feeling of victory deep inside

He goes from a water hell to a fiery hell. Along with a load of others he is deported to the notorious detention centre on Manus Island. In this place, he tells the story of himself and other prisoners who are detained and treated with the most inhumane contempt. He tells his story of survival in this place as well as the stories of those around him.

We are four hundred people /
Four hundred lost souls in a tightly confined space /
four hundred prisoners /
Anticipating the nights we can leave /
. . . so we can leave /
. . . and enter our nightmares.

There is no denying that this is a grim read. The prison is full of cruel people, both immigrants and the warders, but there is still humanity in some of the things that he witnesses. Most amazingly, this was written one text at a time from a secret mobile phone in prison sent to someone on the outside and was translated and published before he was released. He has now been granted asylum in New Zealand and from what I can gather is making a new life for himself. It is not the most literary of books but should be necessary reading for those trying to understand how unnecessarily horrible most asylum seekers are treated.

4.5 out of 5 stars

People seem to forget that we are an integral part of the natural world and this planet. Ultimately, everything that we do will have an effect and repercussions much further down the line. This piece of art by Jim Vision and Louis Masai says it all really:

One of the creatures that we really have to look after is insects. They are essential for life in so many ways, so of which we know and as Goulson, says in the book, echoes Donald Rumsfeld of all people, in ways that we have not even begun to comprehend. As they disappear because of our actions; spraying vast swathes of land with toxic chemicals, drenching plants with weedkillers and pumping vast quantities of climate-changing gasses into the atmosphere, the world as we know it will change irrevocably.

Goulson is drawing all his scientific knowledge to do two things in this book. The first is to show the shocking and often cataclysmic decline in insect populations that have taken place in recent decades and the reasons why this has happened. The second is to show how and why we need change at every level of government and society. We have to look after these invertebrates; our lives depend on them.

This is not an easy book to like, but sadly it is a necessary final warning shot across the bows as our species wreaks havoc across the world. The focus in this book is on Goulson’s favourites, the insects, however, he lays all of the facts out very clearly and draws on the evidence provided by science about the devastation that we are causing. It would be nice to think that this could be read by more MPs, who are in a position to do something about it, but I fear that it won’t be. It is a sobering and vitally important read.

4 out of 5 stars

I have been up and down the A1 on a few occasions, but it is not a road that I know that well. The road that it replaced, the Great North Road, ceased to exist in 1921, but if you knew where to look on the maps then you could still trace the route from London to Edinburgh.

For the centenary of this moment, Steve Silk has decided that he wants to try and follow the 500-mile route (there is a song in that) over 11 days as best he can on his bike. He wants to see if he can find the old coaching inns that were described in the book by Charles G Harper who undertook a similar journey on a bike which at the time was a new technology.

He doesn’t begin the journey in the oddly named street of St Martin’s-le-Grand, where the mail coaches began, he has chosen a bike café nearby. He has his photo taken with his old fashioned bike, a Jamis Aurora and heads out into the London traffic. A very angry skip lorry driver nearly makes sure that is as far as he gets, but he survives and he is soon passing the M25 on the way to the first day’s stop Stevenage.

His chosen route will take him through and past towns and cities such as Stevenage, Doncaster and Newcastle. However, the real jewels of this journey are the villages that he passes through and the stories that they have to tell him. He gets to meet and eat the Bedfordshire Clanger (not from the TV series), discovers who ‘Drunken Barnaby’ is, goes to see the Devil’s Arrows and visits many battlefield sites.

I think Steve has taken a simple premise and made a really good job of writing a interesting and entertaining book about parts of the UK that I know only a little about. It is about the ride, but it is also about discovering more about the places he travels through. He is endlessly curious and sees everything with a journalist’s eye and finds the nuggets of information that reveal our rich and varied past. I liked that he wasn’t trying to break any records, it was just him and his bike and hundreds of years of history to explore.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Contrary to the message that is pumped out by the oil industry, we are in the middle of a climate crisis. As well as the billions of tonnes of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, there is a massive loss of biodiversity and a scandalous amount of waste and pollution. For the regular person, they can all feel a little hopeless with all this bad news.

But we have got ourselves into this mess and we are the only species that can do something to turn this around, however, we seem to be lacking the political willpower to do something. There is lots of hot air from politicians, but there are still significant people in our current government who are still banging out the mantra from the oil companies that net-zero is unachievable.

I first came across 39 Ways To Save the Planet on Radio 4. Tom Heap is an enthusiastic presenter and when I found there was a book at my local library I grabbed it. Each of the 39 ideas is a short essay on a specific idea that people are actually doing to solve one aspect of the climate crisis. There are some excellent ideas here and they have been grouped into various broader subjects such as energy, society, transport and industry. Three I like in particular are, bamboo, thorium nuclear energy and low carbon steel.

Each essay is short and to the point, what Heap is trying to show is there are lots of people out there that do care and that they care enough to actually do something about it. There is a brief summation of the benefits of each of the ideas at the end of each chapter. I would have liked to have seen a summary at the end to total up all of these changes to show what an impact just these 39 could have. There are a lot more out there trying to make a difference and my fear is that we might be too late!

4 out of 5 stars

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

It is really hard being a travel writer when you’re not allowed to travel. This was the problem that Simon Parker had as the pandemic swept around the world at the beginning of 2020. Gone were the fancy flight and stays in nice hotels that were his natural habitat in his career as a travel journalist. His partner’s public relations business had more or less folded and they had no income and didn’t know when they would be able to earn again.

They had to give up their flat and move elsewhere and then to top it all a close friend died. The anxiety that he somehow had managed to keep suppressed began to bubble up and he knew that if he didn’t do something soon he would be a total lost cause. The therapies that he knew would work were travelling and exercise and it was these two activities that he turned to. He made a plan to cycle from the most northerly point on the British Isles, and he paused, overlooking the magnificently named Muckle Flugga, a lighthouse in Shetland. He climbed on his bike and cycled away.

Apart from the odd training ride, he had done very little training and he knew that he was going to feel it very soon. It was a journey that he hoped would help him meet new people and experience new things, the first person he came across on Shetland that he wanted to ask the way was a postman. His PPE was one stage down from a hazmat suit and it was then it dawned on him that cycling in the midst of a covid pandemic, might not be the trip he had envisaged.

Travel, I was reminded, was only ever a force for good.

It would change though and the people that he would meet as he cycled south would show kindness and generosity in equal measure. Not only is it an exploration of Scotland and England at 15mph on a bicycle in the midst of a pandemic, but it is a journey through Parker’s mind as he battles with self-doubt, anxiety and his mental health. On top of that, he has had to cope with the grief of losing two close friends. But in amongst that maelstrom he somehow manages to hang on and the dark moments fade away with the help of friends, family and the strangers that he meets on his ride.

I liked this a lot. Not only is it a really good travel book about his two journeys around the coast of the UK in the time of the pandemic and numerous lockdowns but Parker is using it to be open about addressing sensitive and complex issues about his mental health. It goes to prove that the greatest adventure you can have is not scaling vast mountain ranges, rather is it coming to terms with your abilities and limits.

4 out of 5 stars

I thought that this was a great collection of photographs of my home county. Pinner has a great eye for framing these shots and I think that his best shots are those that feature water in one form or another. Particular favourite photos include the spring sunset at Sandbanks, a misty summer sunrise over Wareham and the delights of the Jurassic Coast.

Most of the places in the photographs I am familiar with and in certain cases know really well. There was the odd place that I didn’t know and have added to the list to visit at some point. If you like Dorset you’ll probably love this collection.

4 out of 5 stars

I have often wondered about keeping a record of some of the species that I see but have never quite got around to it. Knowing me it will probably be a spreadsheet. What I can’t do though is the amazing way of recording the wildlife that Jo Brown finds in her garden and near her home.

In this beautiful book are ninety pages of her beautiful art of creatures such as blue tits and frogs, insects like the cockchafer and shield bugs and orchids, campions and a number from the weird and wonderful world of fungi.

These are a stunning set of artworks that Jo has made from the common and less common wildlife that is found in her garden or at various locations near her home. I like her style, the pictures feel alive and dynamic and are full of colour and details. Each of the pages has notes about the featured subject, and details on what you need to look for when identifying them. I like that she has recorded the location of most of the flora fauna and fungi on each of the pages. So locations, like her garden or for particular rare species are kept deliberately secret. Highly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

For the past two decades, Marc Hamer has cared for a twelve-acre garden. It is not his, rather it is owned by a lady called Dorothy Cashmere who lives alone on this vast property. They have a strange relationship, they are formal and polite with each other and yet there is an intimacy there that comes from knowing each other for a long time and sharing this garden.

The book follows his work and musings about life and the universe seem through this garden. There are the mundane elements of gardening such as cutting the grass and deadheading, as it is about finding the joy in the way that the garden changes every single day. He sees beauty in all parts of the growing process, from the unfurling of a leaf in the spring, the hum of bees around a proliferation of flowers in the summer and the gentle decay of a dahlia flower in the autumn.

I wake to the applause of rain and wonder for a moment…

As he explains in the book, he has had a tough life has been a vagrant, homeless and had stood at the very edge of the abyss at times. That has all changed now and one of the things that come across in his writing is that he is immensely happy with his lot now. He has learnt from his life that he wants for little apart from his books and a dram of whisky on a regular basis.

This garden is my temple. I come here and expect to feed and taste the world. I make it lovely for the pleasure of it being so, for the labour that is good for my body and my mind.

Hamer’s writing has a wistful melancholy about it and it is often quite beautiful. It is basically a collection of essays, some less than a page and others that are much longer. The essays are loosely pulled together in some order, but there are some that don’t quite fit the month that he has grouped them into. The book also feels a bit like I imagine the gardens he creates, not formal, more arranged in a way that there is beauty in the disorder, surprises as he changes the subject depending on what he wants to write about at the time. It might not be for everyone, but I really like it.

4 out of 5 stars

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

To sit a watch the waves by the sea is one of the ways that I find to relax, but under this ever-moving surface there is often much more going on than you realise. Life and death in all of its form is taking place day in and day out and we are totally unaware of it. One way of seeing the creatures that inhabit this space is to go rock pooling.

In the intertidal zone, as the water recedes some creatures are left in the pools and if you know where and how to look, you can find a rich variety of life. On the coastline of Argyll, Nicholson wants to see what he can find in this zone, but first, he needs permission from the Scottish Crown to create his own rock pools. It is quickly granted and he sets about making them using rocks and waterproof cement. It was cold work and took three days but he had his first pool. The first tide came and went that evening and under the light of a full moon, he could see the first life in his torchlight; prawns.

The first few chapters are about each of the creatures that he finds in the pool; winkle, crab, anemone and sandhopper, with a potted history of each. The second part of the book suddenly zooms right out from the microscopic view, and then he is considering the tides that bring these animals in twice a day before taking an even bigger step back to look at the geological time and the rock that make up the bay.

The final section is the people that have inhabited this shoreline, how they came to be there, how they survived on the most meagre of rations and their faith that somehow sustained them is this harsh place. The book ends with the creations of a third and final pool and the latest influx of creatures that end up within it.

As with almost all of Nicolson’s books, this is a well researched and well-written book. He has a way of writing that feels knowledgeable and accessible at the same time and I always come away feeling that I have learnt something. What did through me a little though was the way he went from a detailed examination of the life in these pools that he has made to a full widescreen view of tides and how the very rocks he was standing on came about? It is a bit discombobulating, but picks up on a thread that is appearing in more books that I read at the moment; everything is interconnected even over aeons of time. This is a really good book and I highly recommend that you read it.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Rachel Carson is now rightly considered to be one of the environmental thinkers and writers of the twentieth century. Her seminal work, Silent Spring was the book that told the public of the scandal behind pesticide pollution and the way that the companies who sold the products used disinformation to downplay just how dangerous they were. More worrying was the indifference of public officials who took the chemical companies ‘evidence’ as truth.

The clouds are as old as the Earth itself – as much a part of our world as land or sea
They are the writing of the wind on the sky.

But she wrote lots more than just that book and this slim volume is a collection of her previously unpublished work, essays, field journals, speeches, articles and letters. It is an interesting read, full of well-informed arguments and criticism of those that were still ignoring the evidence that indiscriminate use of toxic chemicals was having on the wild environment. There is more in here than that. Some of the essays showed just how poetic she could be in her writing, I thought she was particularly good when writing about the sea and shoreline.

Contrary to the beliefs that seem to often guide our actions, man does not live apart from the world; he lives in the midst of a complex dynamic interplay of physical, chemical and biological forces, and between himself and this environment there are continuing, never-ending interactions

I must admit that I have never read Silent Spring, so this is the first book of hers that I have read. Even though some of the articles and essays are dated and the world has changed in better and worse ways since a lot of these were written, some of the points that she is making are sadly still valid today. I liked her writing style, she has a way of making her point that leaves the reader very clear on her intentions and passion.