Category: Review (Page 26 of 132)

3.5 out of 5 stars

Even though they don’t move very far or very fast, glaciers are on the move. Not just downhill, the way that the planet is warming because of climate change, they are melting at an accelerating rate. Almost every glacier around the world is smaller than it was 50 years ago and there are some that have almost vanished completely.

What this means for the planet and the people that live alongside the sea as sea levels rise is anyone’s guess. We are just on the tipping point of being able to save them, though many think it is too late. One of the experts who knows a lot about these geological marvels is Professor Jemma Wadham. She has been obsessed with them for a long time now and in this books, she hopes to teach us about them.

They are not just sterile icy lakes either, her research with a number of other scientists has proven that they are full of life and are active processors of carbon and nutrients, just like our forests and oceans, influencing crucial systems and in no surprise are a key part of the way that life functions on our planet.

Sadly though climate change is having a debilitating effect on them, Even since she has been a glaciologist she has seen a dramatic decline in their size as they slowly melt. In this book, she takes us to some of the places from Greenland to Patagonia and the Antarctic that she has been to in her research about these cold geological marvels.

I thought that this was quite a good book, and Wadham writes in a way that shows that she is a master of her subject. However, I did have a couple of reservations about it. Firstly, I felt it was like reading an academic paper at certain points in the text, the narrative would be like reading a travel book one moment and then I suddenly felt out of my depth. There are a couple of personal elements in here that she writes about, but for this book it felt out of place, this is a science book rather than a memoir. That said, if you want a snapshot of the perilous state of the planet’s glaciers this is a good place to start.

4 out of 5 stars

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

It has been a while since I have been to the Lake District but I remember walking the fells and enjoying the fresh air and views. Whilst it feels wild and bleak, it is a landscape that has been managed by man for hundreds of years. I have very little recognition of seeing much in the way of wildlife, thinking about it now, it just seemed to be a partially sterile landscape, with not much opportunity for life to thrive.

One f the people trying to bring life back to these hills is Lee Schofield. He is the site manager for RSPB Haweswater and he is responsible for two hill farms coving thirty square kilometres of the uplands. They are close to the district’s largest reservoir and he along with other employees and stakeholders are slowly returning the landscape to a place that suits wildlife as well as farm animals.

Fighting the entrenched views is actually not helped by the pace being designated a UNESCO world heritage site. That seemed to focus on the cultural heritage more than the possibilities for rewilding and restoring habitats for animals such pine marten and birds like the corncrake that are just about surviving. Learning how others are tackling similar issues will take him to Norway and Italy to see how they manage and it gives him a lift as well as a raft of ideas.

But what he needs most every day is resilience. Dealing with people who don’t care a single iota about the perilous state of the wildlife in the area is wearing. Where Isabella Tree in Wilding shows what can be done when you have complete control of the lands that you own, the reality of most attempts are rewilding is going to be much closer to this; the reigning back in of ambitions because of the restrictions of various stakeholders, the resistance that people have to change and always battling the system that suits the vested interests of large landholders.

Schofield is passionate about the natural world and that comes across in every page in this his first book. It is not an easy read as he has to battle against the tide of opinion from farmers who have been there for many generations. It is not always an easy task and he does sometimes get despondent with all that he is pushing against. But over the course of the book, he demonstrates that it is possible to make progress and to find a way that suits both farming and nature. I thought that this was well worth reading for a realistic view of returning a landscape to suit the natural world. Highly recommended reading.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Until he moved house it hadn’t really occurred to him quite how many books that Hodkinson actually owned. Eight boxes of books with around forty per box made 3200. It was actually a little bit more than that, he now knows that he owns 3500 books. He calls it his book cave.

How did he get to that many books though? When he was growing up in Rochdale there was one book in his house, the now rare, Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. ( I really want to get a copy of this!!!) It was kept on top of a wardrobe with other items of great worth. He was allowed to read it, but it had to be treated with all due reverence and care.

Growing up a working-class lad during the 1970s and 1980s was for most of his peers a book free experience. e liked the same music as they did, but there was something about the magic of the worlds contained in a book that he fell for completely. He was quite unusual in trying to find books in out of way places and came across a lot of characters as he slowly began to read and acquire books.

He said at a careers interview that he wanted to be a writer, the guy asked if he meant journalist, and he said no writer. He suggested Marks & Spencer needed people and to apply there. He didn’t but did pursue a job in journalism. These were the days before the internet so the local paper was still read widely and could offer a career path, and for Hodkinson, this opened up opportunities where he finally became a writer and a publisher.

It is an interesting story of his life and there were parts of it I really liked. There are parts that made me laugh in here and it brought back memories of my time growing up in the same decades. It is not just about books though, it is about his take on life and is full of the happy and sad memories he still carries with him. All the way through the book he punctuates his life story with snapshots of his grandfather and the life that he had. It adds a sad and melancholy note to the book, but it reminds us that he has not always had the easiest path through life working as a rare northern-based publisher. I am not counting my books either…

4 out of 5 stars

This is not going to be a review as such, there is far too much data and information in this book to be able to sum it up and quantify it in any meaningful way. I will say that Belton has done a fantastic job in relentlessly and tirelessly sifting through vast amounts of information to try to track what the Putin regime has been doing since he became President.

Money is the key to the way that the regime works, with the vast sums from the energy supplies fund Putin, his men and their chosen oligarchs. Money flows away from Russia into many offshore banks, through nested companies that have no apparent owners to secret accounts. Making this money legal by laundering it is key and Belton explains clearly the methods that they use to make it legitimate.

The ex KGB men also want to fund organisations and people who deliberately are seeking to undermine Western society and they use the black funds over the world to support the far left and right organisations that are responsible for the rise of populism and some terror attacks. The ex-KGB men that make up the current regime have got everything in a tight grip in Russia too. They control the courts, the banks and the security services and any criticism of Putin is treated very harshly.

The West may have thought that they won the Cold War, but reading this shows that their complacency and greed means that they have fallen for the deception that the regime has played over the long term. Belton details the methods that they have used to undermine particular political individuals and tie them into their way of thinking.

How she did this is beyond me as the entire regime is a nest of Russian dolls in a hall of mirrors and with several smoke machines running full tilt. It is not an easy read for many reasons, but if you have the slightest interest in world politics and the way that it is going, especially in the light of current events in 2022, then you should read this.

5 out of 5 stars

As one of the little people, you will find that the rules are more ruthlessly applied to anything that you try and do. If you are fortunate enough to be able to pay in a large cheque to your bank then there are all sorts of hoops that you have to jump through to prove that you are not money laundering. However, if you are much richer then banks will be falling over themselves to ensure that they are going to be custodians of your money and they are discreet in their questioning as to where the money has actually come from, or if it is even yours.

When the money disappears into this global finance system, the chances of the original owner of it being able to ever get it back again is almost nil. It is laundered and then becomes available for the multibillionaire as a tax-free asset to spend on another yacht or a house on a tropical island that their newly bought private jet can whisk them to.

Whilst corruption has been a problem that we have had for millennia, we are now at a point where it is difficult to tell apart the good guys from the bad guys as the grey area is now the entire banking system.

In this book, Bullough tries to shine a light into this dark pit he is calling Moneyland. But the people that make up the global super-rich really do not want other people looking in to see what they are doing and knowing the ways that they hide their money from tax officials governments and in the case of many politicians, from the people that they are supposed to be serving.

I will not say any more than that, because, I want you to find this book and read it yourself. I am amazed that he has managed to find out as much as he has to write the stories in this book. Mostly because the people that have got the money by fair means and foul really really do not want you to know what methods they use to hide it way. He makes some tentative suggestions of how we can fix it, but those with money can often wriggle out of any imposition of rules because of their great wealth. I hope it will make you angry too, as reading this made me feel helpless that we are at a point now where we cannot do anything.

2.5 out of 5 stars

The sound of waves against a stony beach is quite soothing, but sitting on a beach like that is not the most comfortable unless you have a chair. The beach that I remember the most is the one at Norman’s Bay in Sussex; the stones there are multi-coloured from a pale grey to a fawn brown. But if you were to pick up a pebble from the beach, what stories could it tell you?

In this book, Zalasiewicz will take us on through the story of this single pebbles journey from the origins of the universe, the creation of our planet and the movement of the tectonic plates that have shifted the sediments from the surface and sea beds deep into the heart of the planet,

We will learn how the pebble is just not a piece of rock, smoothed by the relentless waves. Rather it is a tiny time machine that if you know how and where to look, it can reveal secrets on how it was made, the remnants of the creatures contained within and how it came to be in that place where it was found.

Mostly this is ok, but I did have several issues with it. I liked the concept of following the timeline of the pebble that he found from the beginnings to that moment of collection, but I thought that taking it right back to the moment of the big bang was a little too far. Even though parts of it were interesting, I did find that it veered too much into academic prose fairly often. One for those that are really into their geology!

3 out of 5 stars

We visit Wiltshire, the county north of us, on a regular basis as my brother in law lives there. Like Dorset is full of ancient monuments scattered across the landscape, the most famous of which is Stonehenge. And like Dorset, it is very picturesque.

In this photobook, published after his death from cancer, Steve Day’s wife has chosen the very best images that he took from his collection of around 20,000 photos.

There are some stunning images in here of the landscapes across the county. I particularly liked the images of the chalk downlands taken throughout the year some lit by the soft autumn sun or those with the dusting of frost. It would have been nice to have an image per page as on some they had split them across the binding and it lessened the impact of the photo.

4 out of 5 stars

As I sit writing this review, in front of my computer screen is a collection of pebbles and other stones that have been collected from a number of local beaches and some from holidays. I have a couple of pikes of the pink Jersey granite and some Sicilian marble as well as fossils from Seatown Beach on the other side of Dorset.

Seatown Beach is at the very far end of the tombolo beach that is Chesil. It is this beach that Christopher Stocks begins the book with and it is a beach that he knows well as he has a house alongside it. The section of the beach that he is lives near is the eastern end where the pebbles are at their largest and he can hear them being made as they are churned around in the waves.

The book will take us from this wonderful beach the beach that Derek Jarman on the bleak Dungeness headland, the old Iron age hill fort of maiden Castle and even to the Natural History Museum and a rogue hand grenade.

Stocks’ prose is conversational and relaxed. He has picked his subjects well and has found lots of interesting anecdotes and has managed to get the balance of providing enough information about the geology of the pebbles that you are likely to find on the beach without making it read like an academic tome. However, what makes this short book so special is Angie Lewin’s beautiful artwork throughout the book. I had got this from the library, but as I like it so much I think I am going to get a copy of my own. You can find her artwork here.

3 out of 5 stars

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

I cannot recall how many programmes I have seen on or about the Victorians, their successes and flaws are well documented and we still live with glimpses of their buildings and the social norms that they imposed on our society. I didn’t know much about the people of the Georgian age though, and this book intends to make people more aware of them.

Peel has chosen twelve people to show Georgian Society. Rather than pick from the aristocracy and political elite, though a couple of them do feature, we have and wide range of people. Some are well known, or in Lord Byron’s case that is more infamy, and there are others that had faded into obscurity. He uses that to show how open and permissive the society was compared to the stuffy and secretive Victorians.

I did have a few favourites from the people he featured. Anne Bonny and Mary read were pirates showed the men how to do cause havoc in the Caribbean properly. Tipu Sultan was a name that I hadn’t come across before. He was famous for keeping the entire British Empire at bay for many years.

Being an engineer, I had heard of James Watt so knew most of the story of his success in steam engines. And of course, there is Dorset’s own Mary Anning. Even though she didn’t get credit for it at the time, it was her work in finding at cataloguing the fossils that she found on the cliff of Lyme Regis that created the science of planetology. We mustn’t forget that she was poor and uneducated and still could hold her own against the learned gentlemen of Oxford University.

Overall this is a reasonable book. Peal has managed to make the history of the Georgian period relatively accessible as he explores it through the lives of twelve people. It is not a serious history book, so if you are expecting detailed analysis and scholarly prose then this might not be the book for you. It is an easy and entertaining read and he does helpfully provide a list of further reading, should you want to explore this period in history more.

4 out of 5 stars

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

In 1999 Ruth Pavey bought her tiny patch of Somerset and it has been a place of refuge for her. It was scrubland initially, and she has replanted it and knows almost every tree in there. This book is a year in the life of her woodland. Even though it is a tiny oasis in the modern factory-farmed countryside until recently it had harboured a wide variety of life. But one day she notices that there are not as many rabbits around as there used to be, in fact, she can’t remember when she saw the last one.

She sets about trying to work out what had happened to the population of rabbits and this makes her think about the wider effect that the climate crisis is having. She gets help from experts to look for and list the species that they find in the woods. It makes for quite an interesting list of plants and birds, but she knows that there are not as many there used to be.

Over the course of a year, she has a constant stream of family and friends visiting. Some are there to help with the maintenance and other tasks and there are picnics and an evening of moth trapping and planting of trees for the longevity of the wood. She wants to know who owned the woodland originally and the search for the Sugg family takes her to local history experts in the area teasing details out from the records. But mostly this is about having wood of her own to spend time in alongside the natural world.

I thought that this was a really lovely follow up to her first book, A Wood of One’s Own. The wood is no longer new to her and after two decades of owning it, she is realising that it still needs as much care and attention as it did when she first bought it. Her prose is gentle and reflects how much she loves spending time here. But in amongst the gentle breezes that rustle the leaves in her wood is a mirror on the wider world and how even a place like this that has not been drenched in chemicals can be affected by the wider ecological catastrophe that is happening. It really makes me want to own a little patch of woodland I can call my own.