Category: Review (Page 33 of 133)

3.5 out of 5 stars

One of the things that set us apart from the other creatures of the planet is our ability to tell stories and to imagine ourselves in the place of others. The stories that we tell are sometimes true and at other times the truth is buried in the legends of the land. Those legends often have a fantastical element that is frequently dark.

To bring these stories to a new modern audience is quite a feat by all these authors. They have all taken the essence of the original and moulded and shaped it to a contemporary context. There was the odd outstanding one, in particular, I liked both the Panther’s Tale and Holloway.

I am going, to be honest and say that I really liked the re-telling and imagining of these old folklore tales compared to the originals. I think it was because the context feels more relevant. That said, the old tales do reach deeper into the darker and creepier shadows that inhabit our landscapes and all the authors of these stories have managed to convey that feeling of dread that you can sometimes get with the old stories both.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Travel is supposed to be challenging, you are out of your comfort zone, you are in unfamiliar places, often surrounded by people who don’t speak the same language as you and have a very different culture. It can pay rich dividends and give you an insight into how people live and how different it is to your way of life. These places that you see, the sunsets that you watch and the interactions that you have with other people, shape who you are.

It is no coincidence that kindness starts with ‘kin’

There are moments though where you are at your lowest ebb or something has happened where you need help and this book is full of those moments where travel writers needed that little bit of compassion from the people around them. There are stories from the well known, such as Benedict Allen and Ed Stafford and other stories from writers that I have not come across, such as Faraz Shibli and Tina Brocklebank.

The stories are as varies as the people who have written them; one writer tries to outrun a blizzard on her bicycle, an out of work forestry worker who would join Ed Stafford on the longest walk of his life and two men who wanted to do the Lands End to John O Groats route starting only in their underwear and who were utterly reliant on the generosity of strangers to clothe and feed them.

I am a part of all that I have met – Tennyson, Ulysses

This is a heartwarming collection of stories from travel writers who have experienced human kindness that was given selflessly by people who were are often in pretty dire straits themselves. That those people who showed compassion and empathy to others in their greatest need shows that as a species we are capable of doing these things.

4 out of 5 stars

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

If you have ever been out for a walk in the countryside and wonder what those lumps and bumps in the field are, or curious as to what that pile of sticks is in a tree, then A Spotter’s Guide to Countryside Mysteries is a good a place as any on your journey of discovery.

Split into three sections, the Field, The Wood and the Seashore, Wright leads us on a journey of discovery through the natural and man-made worlds. If you want to know the difference between a tussock, a piddock and a pollard, or what animal actually makes cuckoo spit or where and when you would find hair ice or if cramp balls are as painful as it sounds…

The book is packed full of information about the features that Wright has chosen to include in the book, along with pictures of typical examples to help you find them when you are out and about. I have come across some of the features that he mentions, such as holloways, pollards and water meadows. There were lots of subjects that I hadn’t come across, tussocks, pillow mounds, spalted wood and the honeycomb worm.

I really liked this book. Wright takes what you would think is a complex subject matter and makes it simple to understand and more importantly easy to spot the things that he talks about in this book. He has a way with words, making this an easy and entertaining read with the occasional part that made me chuckle. If you want to find out more about the lumps and bumps in the countryside around you when you are walking then 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.

Comic book artist Mike Mason arrives at San Diego Comic-Con expecting the usual things, fan contact, meeting up with other creators and spending time in the bars with the odd hangover.

What he is not expecting though is his main rival, Danny Lieber, to stagger through a load of cosplayers and drop down dead from two gunshot wounds. Nor is he expecting to be the prime suspect of murder because Danny had been having an affair with his wife.

He knows he didn’t do it, however, persuading the police that he is innocent is going to take a lot of work. First, he has to find the girl who took him on her rickshaw to the Unconditional Surrender statue to prove that he wasn’t there when it took place. Finding her would take him into some of the darker and weirder places of counter culture and be a bit of an eye-opener for him.

I don’t want to say too much more as it would give stuff away, but I thought that this was a bit of a romp. It is full of things that you would expect to find at a con, loads of comic book references and dropped unsubtly in the middle is a murder mystery. I liked the fast pace of it too and thought that the plot was fairly well constructed all things considered.

2.5 out of 5 stars

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

Is there life out there? It is a question that has taxed some of the finest minds and we are not really any closer to answering it. We can speculate about how many stars have planets that might have the particular and specific factors that allow life to arise. Even though we can now see those stars that have planets orbiting, we are still no closer to proving that they carry a form of life that we can detect.

What we have learnt through the pioneering work of scientists such as Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, Jack James, Vladimir Vernadsky and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis is much more about is how life has formed and was created on this planet. Their pioneering work is explored in this book as Frank writes about their discoveries and the way that they changed our understanding of how a planet changes and evolves over millennia.

Overall I thought this was ok. He is a reasonable writer and the prose was engaging without being too dry and academic. That said I felt that it seemed to lack a little focus as to what he was trying to achieve from a popular science book and it felt too speculative at times throughout the book.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

The island of Cyprus holds a strategic position in the Mediterranean and it has been invaded by various powers from the Phoenicians right up to the Turkish who invaded in 1974, they split the island in two and their portion is only recognised by Turkey. There is a lot of history on this tiny island.

When Joachim Sartorius arrived there in 1984, s decade after the invasion, he was there in an official capacity as the German Ambassador to the island. This meant that he could do something that most of the residents couldn’t do, which was to freely travel from the north to the south. What he did on these journeys over three summers was to make a record of what life was like in each partitioned part of the island.

This book is part of that record, and he took the time to return years after to fill in some of the gaps that he had in his notes. I really liked this book. Sartorius writes with an obvious affection for the island and the people who live there. His prose (or at least the translated version) is quite beautiful, I liked the way that he wove the troubled history of the island into the encounters that he had, without looking to judge why it had happened or who was to blame. I felt that he has completely captured the atmosphere of the islands, from the old rural side of the islands away from the tourist bustle, or watching donkeys trying to grab the little shade that they can find under a mulberry tree.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Sadly I must admit I have never seen a hummingbird except on the pages of a book or on a screen of some form. They are a bird that can only be found in the Americas and I haven’t been there! They are quite amazing little birds though. They have evolved exclusively to feed on the nectar of flowers and each species has found and exploited a particular niche that suits them.

They have an incredibly high metabolic rate and have to feed a lot during a day just to survive. They are tiny birds too, the largest is only nine inches long, but only weighs 24g! The smallest is the bee hummingbird and is a mere two inches long and only weighs 2g. Their name comes from the noise that the wings make as they hover in front of the flowers flapping them at up to 88 beats a second. There are well over 300 of these amazing little subspecies of birds.

As with a lot of creatures at the moment, they are poised on a knife-edge of survival, mostly caused by us again, with habitat destruction being one of the key reasons. The wildlife photographer, Jon Dun wanted to make sure that he could get to see them before they disappeared for good.

His travels around America will take him from the jungles of South America right up to Alaska, yes, there are even hummingbirds there. He goes looking for the Violet-crowned Hummingbird in Arizona, for the smallest hummingbird in Cuba and uncovers the link between these brightly colour birds and 007. He explores how the feather trade impacted them and chases Coquettes in Brazil and Bolivia.

I must say that I really liked this. Jon is a thoughtful and enthusiastic writer who is passionate about his tiny avian subjects. I liked the blend of travel, natural history as well as some of the historical stories of hummingbirds. Some of the places that he ends up in the pursuit of particular species are pretty dangerous! Dunn is a photographer after all, so the colour photos make this book too, so I wouldn’t expect anything less to be honest. Perhaps one day I will get to see one of the amazing and utterly beautiful creatures, but I can’t see that happening any time soon.

4 out of 5 stars

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

If you look back over the history of the earth, you would find that life ebbs and flows in cycles, life blooms and crashes depending on so many different factors that sometimes we can only see with the benefit of hindsight. In the Anthropocene though, we are the ones causing the most recent spate of extinction and it is not getting any better at the moment.

What prompted John Burnside to write about these morbid and depressing extinctions was his near-death experience of Covid. It was a severe case and he ended up in hospital. His wife was told to prepare for the worst. This very act of reaching the abyss and peering over the edge will remain with him forever, as will the taste of that tomato sandwich as his health improved. As he recovered it gave him time to think about the natural processes of death and extinction, renewal and continuity.

When a species becomes extinct, that form is gone: no echoes, no shadow, no living memory. More: it is gone, not only as itself, but as the part it played in the Overall

It is quite a disturbing book at times, he ventures back into history to discuss the Nazi attempts to regenerate the aurochs as they tried to recreate the history of the Song of the Nibelungs. This pursuit of recreating a creature for ideological purposes was doomed to failure, the original animals were driven to extinction in the late seventeenth century. One positive that came from it though is that the land that Goring had is now part of the Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere Reserve which is now home to lots of endangered animals.

Similar ideologies are driving the elite billionaire class that we have in the world today. Their pursuit of money and power is pushing the planet to the ragged edge and it feels like when they have exhausted and polluted it completely, retired to their Bond-style lairs, we won’t have many pieces to pick up. He like many others are starting to do now looks at the politics and powers behind land ownership and how we need to start to reclaim it for all not the few.

Land that belongs to someone is no longer land where anyone can meaningfully belong

Six days after he was supposed to have died, he was collected from the hospital by his wife, he looked out the car windows on the way home realising that in the short time he was very ill, summer had arrived and his outlook on life had changed forever. It took me a little while to get into this collection of four essays. The subject matter is pretty heavy after all. But the book grew on me as I read through it. Burnside is equally concerned about why we are doing what we are, as much as what we are doing to our planet and he proposes ideas that could make a difference to our survival on this small blue dot.

5 out of 5 stars

Tiffany Aching has been building her reputation as the witch of the chalk. People were beginning to trust her and let her help them with their many problems. But somewhere out there is a tangled ball of evil and spite, that has awoken from its slumber. It is full of hatred and malice and one of the things that it has begun to do is to stir those old stories about the witches. The trust that she had carefully built is fading away.

She has been caring for the local Baron and when he suddenly dies in front of her she is suspected of his murder. His only son, Roland, is in the city of Ankh-Morpork and she travels there to tell him of his late father’s demise. On the journey there though she is attacked by the Cunning Man. Her arrival in the city is fraught, she is always shadowed by the Nac Mac Feegles and they manage to destroy one of the cities pubs and she and another witch, Mrs Proust, who lives in the city are arrested and locked up for their own safety.

After they are released the following day, Tiffany meets Eskarina Smith a rare woman who became a wizard. She explains where the Cunning man came from and the sort of horrors he is capable of. They return to their home on the chalk and find a soldier trying to dig up the Nac Mac Feegles home. She is arrested and thrown into the dungeon but escapes soon after.

As the guests start to arrive for the funeral and then the wedding of Roland and Letitica, herself a talented but untrained witch, they are joined by Granny Weatherwax and all the other witches who are there to observe the coming showdown between Tiffany and the Cunning Man.

They will be a reckoning. But nobody knows who will win.

I can sum this up in two words, just brilliant. I loved the way that the story circles around through the labyrinth he has created before it builds to the ending that is drawn deeply from folklore. It was good to have some of the Watch characters appear too. If there was one flaw it was the ending, it was over almost too quickly, as I was expecting a bit more of a showdown with the Cunning Man. Tiffany seems to build in stature though and there is one more book with her in, the final book that he wrote.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

All of my life I have known four seasons spring, summer, autumn and winter. as the world turns on each of the solstices and equinoxes each season brings certain delights. Over my life, these have been In recent years with the coming catastrophe that is climate change, it feels like we have been reduced to two seasons: warm wet winters and cool wet summers. Unseasonal weather throughs people too; another effect of climate change, wearing a T-shirt in November on a hot day or suffering the inclement weather as the summer holidays start is becoming more and more common.

It wasn’t until I saw this book that it had even crossed my mind that there would be more than four seasons, but different parts of the world actually have different seasons that we do here in the Northern hemisphere. Japan though is unique in having 72 seasons. They are called micro seasons and they only last four or five days each. The system is, as you would expect from the Japanese, incredibly detailed and deeply rooted in their culture. For example, the micro season of Pure and Clear is between the 5th and 9th of April and it is when the swallows return in the spring there.

Parikian has taken these micro seasons and sees how they fit our seasons and place on the globe. Each chapter has what the micro season is in Japanese and the translations and for each small period, he heads out onto his local streets to discover what is happening on his local patch and to make notes about it. This is during the time of lockdown so he is only allowed out for the permitted hour to see what he can see in that brief period of time.

Even that restricted time and locale gives him plenty of opportunities to spot all manner of animals, plants, lichens and especially birds. It seems by having that dramatically restricted time available has sharpened his senses to what is around. The local graveyard is a favourite spot, the absence of traffic brings extra peace to his walks there. His observations are full of wonder for even the most mundane of creatures, the joy at seeing a blue tit for the first time after having to isolate kind of sums him up. It is laced with humour, the description of a squirrel running across a branch is hilarious, but there is also a fury to his writing as he has the time to consider the perilous state of our wildlife in this country.

This is another cracker of a book by Parikian. Following on from Into the Tangled Bank, this is another book that is very much set in his locale. The plan had been to write the book set in various locations around the country, but I think that it is a richer experience because of the limits placed on him. Liked his other books, this made me laugh a lot which I am not sure natural history books are supposed to do… It is also a reminder that the natural world is all around us. You don’t need to chase after the rarities, you can have as much joy in looking at a squirrel trying to get at a bird feeder as you can listening to a hedge full of sparrows fall silent as you approach and then start up again as you pass. Very much worth reading.