Category: Review (Page 37 of 133)

3 out of 5 stars

Sometimes going on a walk can solve things, it gives your brain a chance to work in the background, the natural world can help calm things and it helps with fitness. Katherine May thought it would help her too, she wanted to try and understand why she couldn’t cope with the smallest of things anymore, why motherhood had been so overwhelming and why the world was pressing in on her.

The walk that she wanted to do was the South West Coast Path. This had its own set of problems though. It is quite long at 630 miles and it was the other side of the country from where they lived. But between her and her husband they came up with a plan that in theory would work; he would look after their son during the day while she is walking sections of it and pick her up at the end. She needed to keep the sea to her right and it would all work out.

Every scrap of noise – and I mean visual noise too, and the noise made by chaos and movement, drains me. Half an hour in a crowd or a noisy bar and I am hollowed out entirely. But the noise of the sea is different; it nourishes me. It allows me to reset.

It is on this walk that she has a chance encounter. While listening to the radio she hears someone talking about Asperger’s Syndrome and the answers that she hears are almost exactly the same as she would have given. This revelation is a bit of a shock, but knowing this, begins the long process of coming to terms with it and understanding just why she is different rather than simply awkward, arrogant or unfeeling.

The Maori have recently developed a new set of words to adapt their lexicon for the twenty-first century. Autism is ‘takiwatanga’ meaning ‘in your own time and space’. I find something in this definition that I’ve been craving all my life – the restless urge to live in the time and space that I was born to perceive rather than to fit badly into the one that suits everyone else.

This book is an open and honest account of her discovery of herself and a realisation of her limitations. May’s, Asperger’s diagnosis isn’t a label that will weigh her down rather it is a confirmation that she knew she was different in many ways to most other people. As her doctor tells her, there is no cure, but there are many ways that we can help you with it. There are parts of this where the writing is really beautiful and other parts where, rightly so, her emotional overload explodes on the page. I liked this overall, and if you think that you might be on the spectrum for autism then I would recommend reading this.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Jim Crumley happened to mention that he had been on a trip to the Lakes to his publisher, Sara Hunt. Knowing that she is from that part of the world he was expecting a different conversation to the one that he actually got. Would he like to write a book about the Lakes? He was not sure, this was far south of his well known local patch and even had its own language. Lochs are now lakes, burns are known as becks and they don’t call a mountain a mountain there.

He was unsure, so decided to see what books there were on the region. He spent an hour in a book shop that had a Scotland and Cumbria section and never made it to the Scotland section. He remained unconvinced that he could have anything extra to offer to the already published books. So a little while later, he headed south on the M80, destination High Rigg, and as he arrived the landscape reached out a hand to bid him welcome.

When I embarked on this book’s journey, my only idea was to seek out those elements of what Lakeland has become where true wilderness occurs.

So begins his journey around this magnificent landscape. One of the first things that he spots is a church. Not particularly natural, and not a particularly attractive church either, but inside is a stunning altar designed by the architect George Gilbert Scott, the same man who designed the museum in his home town of Dundee. Perhaps there would be something about this place, after all, something that was confirmed not long after he watched a peregrine fly into the arc of a rainbow.

He has a whole landscape to discover and with that good omen in his mind, he sets about climbing the hills watching barn owls, discovering hidden oak copses, listening to wrens in holly bushes and most importantly spending lots of time sitting in places watching the natural world unfurl about his. This wouldn’t be the Lakes without Wordsworth being mentioned and he is mentioned in context in this book a few times. But this is about the wildlife, and as the book goes on he slowly falls in love with this new landscape and its new and yet still familiar natural world.

So often, the nature writers only task worth the effort is to become nature. Watch and be, and write down what unfolds in that particular collision of time and place.

This is another great book by Crumley. Being taken out of the comfort zone of his usual patch in Scotland has proved his mettle as a quality writer about the natural world. All the way through he tries to avoid the cliched trips in the area, instead, he tries to look for the places that not many have looked for or even seen. I liked the way that he expresses doubts over the area at the beginning explaining that it was the idea of his publisher. However, the wilderness of the national park slowly embraces him and he has a very different opinion of the place by the end of the book. Great stuff.

The cover of this book is just stunning. Really stunning. It is by the artist, Tessa Kennedy whose website is here

4 out of 5 stars

I have never been one to keep a journal or a diary, but I can see why people do it, especially nature diaries. if you are noting the arrival of swifts and the first flush of May flowers then you will never remember the exact day unless you have it written down somewhere.

For writers like Melissa Harrison, it is essential. The seasons grind relentlessly on and if you don’t note those details that you see when out and about then they are missed. This book is a collection of her diary columns for the Nature Notebook in The Times. They go back to August 2014 and are not only a record of what she saw prior to the column being written but a glimpse into her personal life as she moved from a busy city life to the big skies of Suffolk.

One of the things that you will notice is her observation skills. This is something that her father taught her and her other five siblings as they were led on walks over Dartmoor looking for all sorts of things. Walking is her preferred method of interacting with nature. It is fast enough to take in a variety of different habitats over the course of the walk, but slow enough that you don’t miss the things than if you were cycling. Harrison also takes the time to sit, watch and absorb the things around her; the water slipping by a jetty in a river, the way that the light fades at dusk when sitting in a favourite oak tree with a glass of wine.

Each tree, then, is a record of difficulties faced and overcome: tempered as we all are, by each passing year.

I really liked this, her prose is richly detailed without feeling overwritten. . Harrison has a wide interest in all manner of things from the state of the verges to the joy of being able to see a barn owl quartering the field opposite her home in Suffolk. She often says that she is no expert, she is not interested in chasing the tick for a particular species, rather she is walking the footpaths of her village just to spend time in the natural world and to see what is there that particular day. Even though she says she is no expert, the particles of knowledge are building up every time she ventures out, she can now recognise a Cetti’s warbler from their song spotting holes in a riverbank where voles live and spotting dragonflies on a tributary of the Stour in Dorset.

What is also evident is her fury; she rightly gets angry about the sorry state of the natural world and the catastrophic collapses in invertebrates and migrant birds. She was instrumental in getting a contractor to remove the netting from a site in my hometown of Guildford that they had placed over trees just before the nesting season had started. Even though they have been published before, these are the full articles for her country column that have not had the newspaper editor

Her award-winning podcast is here:

3 out of 5 stars

After her previous adventures being sent into another world to just retrieve a lost book sounds perfect. But there is a catch. The world that they are going to be sent to, an alternative 1920s New York full of trigger happy cops and gangsters who are doing their best to work around the prohibition laws.

On top of that Irene is seen as an expendable and deniable resource as the other reason that she has been asked to go is to extract a young librarian who has found himself entangled in the political conflict of two dragon families. The neutrality that the entire library has always sought is under threat.

Arriving in the world she is arrested very soon after as they think that she is a notorious female gangster just in from London. She manages to extract herself from the clutches of the police, but as her photo is spread around the newspapers, she realises that this is not going to be an undercover operation. Next has to find the missing librarian and they have given her a method of determining his location.

She locates him in the next town but getting there is not going to be easy given her profile. Kai and her make their way there and are soon picked up by the local mobster who employs a Fae as one of his assassins. This job is going to be much harder than she thought and she hadn’t met the two dragon factions yet…

This was probably more intense than the previous book in the series. It was nice too, to get away from the theme of the first three, the battle with Alberich. It is a good plot concept too, with a whole different spin of her abilities as a librarian spy. One issue I had, and I have it with all of this type of book, is that however much she gets into scrapes or very deep in the dragon do-do, you know that she is going to get out ok as there is another book in the series. I still like the series though and will be carrying on with the fifth book soon.

3.5 out of 5 stars

It was supposed to be a simple fetch and retrieve routine mission, but a hasty escape through a building that is under siege on fire and where the doors back to the library suddenly are not working. No one other than the person who allocated them the task knew where there were. Leaving the alternate version of the French Revolution is only possible with the help of her assistant Kai who is partly dragon and can move between the worlds when he chooses.

Turns out it wasn’t an isolated incident, many librarians who were also trying to return with the books that had been asked to retrieve were getting stuck in the other worlds. Not everything is right in the world of the library spies and meetings are called to elicit information and to pass on orders on books that need retrieving with the hope of restoring order and balance back again. The powers that be know that a lot of this is being caused by the traitor Alberich, but fighting back against him is going to be difficult.

Irene and Kai head home after the traumatic experience where she finds her home full of deadly spiders, someone really doesn’t want her to be around anymore. Finding out who is betraying secrets of the Library to Alberich is going to take some doing and will take her to some of the darker parts of her home city and test some of her oldest friendships. The Library is trying to get a grip on the situation and she and Kai are asked to head to St Petersburg’s Winter Palace, to retrieve a book that will help restore order.

The place they are going to is a secret and the last person that expects to meet is Alberich, but he is there are waiting for them.

And I am not going to say any more than that! This is the third in the series of Cogman’s Library Spy Series. Whilst I guessed at the outcome of the book, it is a series, after all, the journey to get there is faster paced than the previous two as Irene battles the threat to the library. The characters are more developed than in the first two books too, the author has grown in confidence in her writing and the interplay between the main two characters is stronger and helps the narrative. Onto the fourth book soon.

3 out of 5 stars

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

The first life forms appeared on this small blue dot about 3.7 billion years ago. Since then it has made this place unique in all the planets in the solar system and so far the universe. The number of species has ebbed and flowed constantly, surviving meteorite strikes, mass extinctions and constantly reinventing as everything changes.

So choosing ten species to represent a key aspect of how life is formed from the millions that have gone before is not an easy task. The life forms she has chosen are the fern, a virus, a nautilus, the sponge, a stick insect, the dusky seaside sparrow, the giraffe, softshell turtle, the finches of the Galapagos Islands and of course humans.

For each choice, Taylor has written a chapter with her reasons behind it and lots of details about the lifeform, its place in our world and where it came from on the great family tree of life on this planet. It is packed full of facts and detail about each and I learnt something in every chapter, that the nautilus has been around for millions of years, that some animals are adapting really quickly to environmental change and how convergent evolution shows how vastly different species come up with broadly similar solutions.

There are lots of other books out there that go into much more detail on the origins of life and evolution. However, for some readers there can be too much detail, Taylor in this book has managed to get the balance about right for those venturing into popular science for the first time. I like the way she has picked ten different species to expand on the science of life. There are rich and informative infographics throughout the book that help make it less intimidating. It is a well put together book.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The more that we learn about the natural world the less we realise that we know. The interdependency of every living thing from the alpha predators to the nutrients that move through the system is finely balanced. The way that we have been disrupting and to be frank, most of the time ruining it, is now bringing to light issues that we never even contemplated.

In this book by Peter Wohlleben, he brings to life this web of intricate connections between the most unrelated of animals and plants. These crucial links are not just the predator and prey that ripples up the food chain to the apex predators that you’d expect. These are very important as an overabundance of a particular species can affect countless others if it is not kept in check by its natural predator. He compares it to a clockwork mechanism and in particular to a clock of his grandfathers that he thought that he could take apart and put is back together. He couldn’t and his grandfather was not best pleased.

We’ve already seen that most attempts at fixing things come to nothing, so why not simply trust mechanisms that are millions of years old to carry on functioning without us.

Using this analogy of how tinkering with a system can have massive unknown implications is the theme of the book. He explains how a lack of predators in Yellowstone meant a rise in elk populations who stripped swathes of the vegetation and caused a fall in insects and beavers whose habitats disappeared from the riverbanks. With nothing there to stop the flow, the rivers flooded more often. They released wolves in 1995 who found large numbers of easy to catch elk. As elk numbers dropped, the dynamic of the ecosystem changed, the elk no longer favoured open spaces, i.e. riverbanks, and the plants and trees began to grow back reversing the decline and stabilising the riverbanks once again. The main point of this is that the scientists had never even thought that this one change would have such a multitude of different positive effects in the park.

If you know where to look then you can find these links all over the place. He explains how salmon and trees have mutually beneficial links, why trees don’t like the taste of deer and how ants and aphids have a close relationship. He even looks at some of the folklore myths about the production of beech mast and acorn and given plausible reasons as to why these trees release masses of seeds every few years. Where there is life there is death too, each living thing that passes, from a tiny fly to a huge tree has a range of creatures that are waiting for that very moment; death becomes life and so the cycle repeats.

We need to leave things alone – on a large a scale as possible.

This is not a bad book overall. It is not full of flowery prose, rather it is a concisely written and pragmatic book that uses numerous examples of how the intertwined links in the natural world actually work. The main point that he is making in the book goes back to his clock story at the beginning of the book; namely that these systems are just so complex that even all that we know from scientists studying them, we know so very little of just how they work. It has similar themes to Tapestries of life by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson that has been recently published and is worth reading as a pair.

4 out of 5 stars

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

When it was first put forward as a source of power for the new age, nuclear seemed to offer almost limitless energy. It had begun to go out of favour until there was a resurgence after people realised that it did not emit as much carbon as coal and gas plants. Sadly the reality was much different. Sadly the enormous power plants only had a limited life span and the ones that were built in the 1960s are mostly decommissioned now.

And it turns out it wasn’t clean energy either.

It isn’t the carbon, rather the problem that humanity is going to have with the nuclear industry is the masses of radioactive waste that was generated in the production of uranium for power generation and plutonium that was needed for the weapons industry. Some of the materials are going to be deadly for thousands of years and the cost of decontamination mounts exponentially.

So where are we with it? And what can be done?

These are two of the questions that Fred Pearce sets about trying to answer in this enlightening book on the nuclear industry. He travels to some of the places that have suffered the worst nuclear accidents, Chernobyl is of course one, but there are others that very few people know about. He visits the places that are trying to make these materials safe for our grandchildren and their decedents who will follow. What he also finds is an industry that is struggling to manage the situation and find places where the long term storage facilities are starting to leak into the environment.

It is to be completely frank, quite scary stuff.

Even though this is three years old, the subjects that Pearce brings to light are deeply troubling. Namely, what are we to do with the gargantuan amounts of waste that the nuclear industry generates and the long term (i.e. thousands of years) solutions to neutralizing it or storing it in a safe and secure place. This is a very readable book that is understandable by the layperson too. Read this and be very troubled indeed.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

The planet that we live on is a finely balanced system. We have for far too long been buggering it up though and there is much evidence that we are reaching a tipping point. What people seem to forget is that we are as much a part of the ecosystems as the worm in your garden and the blue whale.

The intricacies and complexity of these relationships and how we interact with the natural world around us is something that has fascinated Ian Carter for many years. In this book, he has brought together a series of essays and articles that he has written over a number of years that look at the way that we and the natural world have co-existed and the benefits and problems that it causes.

It is split into four sections, Closer to Home where there are essays on rats and what birdwatchers do in the quiet months of July and August and even lets us know his favourite bird. The second section is titled Human Nature. In here he extolls the virtues of making mud pies versus playing  Mario, why we name creatures, how one person’s favourite is another person’s nightmare and that even dead animals have a place in the ecosystem.

The third section is titled Conflict. Here are some of the sticky subjects that he wants to deal with including the spectre of plant and animal non-natives, when should we intervene in rescuing wildlife and should we cull wildlife at all? The final section, Wild Places is looking at how we see wildlife; if the place you park has a pay and display machine can it be counted as a wilderness and the delights of the Isle of Skye in January.

I thought this was pretty good overall. Carter has been involved in conservation for over thirty years now. He started with the nature Conservancy Council before moving to English Nature. In his work, he has been involved in a variety of schemes including the reintroduction of Red Kites. This has given him valuable insight into the way that we interact with the natural world and he conveys just how we are dependent on those links to the wildlife around us. I like that the essays are short distillations of his thoughts about a particular subject and be read all in one go, or dipped into as and when it suits. If you want a slightly different perspective on our complex and complicated relationship with the natural world then this is as good a place to start as any.

3 out of 5 stars

History may be written by the victors, but it is made by people from all walks of life. Who these people are is often overlooked in the grander history books, but thankfully we have authors like David Bramwell & Jo Keeling who are prepared to poke around in the dustier areas of our past and tell the stories of those that have made their mark in one way or other.

They have split the characters in this book into five different sections, the first is Tricksters & Subversives, Creative Mavericks, Wild at Heart, Pioneers & Inventors and Explorers of the mind. In each part, there are around ten different people that they have found and are telling the story of.

There are a few that stood out for me. W Reginald Bray was one, who in the pursuit of his art, posted anything and everything that he could get in a letterbox. Quentin Crisp who was camp and gay at a time when it was illegal to be, and Alfred Wallace Russell who worked out evolution at the same time as Darwin and is buried just down the road from me in Broadstone. Two particular favourites are Flora Tristan who stood up for injustice before anyone else and Joseph Campbell who took a huge pile of books to a shack in Woodstock and spent four years reading them.

If you want a history book that looks at the people who often go against the flow and you almost certainly haven’t heard of, then this is a good place to start.