Category: Review (Page 40 of 133)

4 out of 5 stars

The image that Mexico wants to portray of their country is very different to the reality that exists. It is a country that is in the grip of drug gangs who commit all sorts of murders and atrocities with little or no enforcement from the police and army; in fact, in a lot of cases, the police are another arm of the gangs. Given the violence that permeates the country and the border region in particular, there are 30,00 murders a year there, it is probably not the most sensible place to travel, but that has never stopped Paul Theroux.

He begins his journey in the town of Nogales a town of two halves. It is split by a 40-foot high steel fence that separates the United States of America from Mexico and is a microcosm of each country. The US side is prosperous and the Mexican side, run down and impoverished. It fills with people either hoping to make the crossing from south to north or who have been returned from America and have nowhere else to go now.

‘What is the meaning of Coixlahuaca?’
‘El llana de las serpientes.’
The plain of snakes.

He is not there as a tourist though, he wants to try and understand what is the pull of his country to these people and gain an insight into why they risk so much in the hands of coyotes while walking through the deserts of Arizona. To do this, he wants to meet the real people of the border towns, sometimes by taking his American plated car which has its own set of risks as he finds out when he is stopped by an overzealous policeman. He realises that this is not always the most sensible thing to do and often parks it in a secure place and takes the bus instead.

It seems that ever since the border at Reynosa, 1400 miles away, I had been travelling on a royal road through a plain of snakes.

He teaches a writing course for a short while and makes friends with those learning from him. In Oaxaca he becomes a student once again, this time learning Mexican Spanish alongside residents of the town who still maintain their independence from the rest of the country. It feels like a place he could live in. Travelling further into Mexico, he stops in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas where he meets Zapatistas who are trying to force political change in the region.

One of the greatest thrills in travel is to know the satisfaction of arrival and to find oneself among friends.

I have a lot of Paul Theroux’s books (including a signed one) but as yet haven’t read that many of them for a variety of reasons, the top one being that I have so many other books… So far I have read two, this and Deep South. In that book, he was travelling around the southern states of America to try to understand the people of that region in his own country. In here he has popped over the border to discover more about the country that has been the subject of quite a lot of vindictiveness from the previous administration in the White House, Mexico.

Theroux is prepared to meet the locals in the way that suits him best by spending time in their towns and mixing with them. He is a sensitive and perceptive traveller and this comes across in this book as he describes the towns, people and food he experiences each day her is there. He does not seek to judge them, it is a troubled country, that is suffering from gang violence as well as being fundamentally corrupt. Most of the population are just trying to live to support their families, even if that means earning money in America for a portion of their lives.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Our reliance on some of the huge companies in almost all the things we do online is what makes this is a terrifying read. Their hold over us using some of the most sophisticated techniques around to keep us coming back every time our phone squeak at us. It is addictive and it is in those companies interest to keep us addicted too.

They seem to circumvent regulation too, claiming that they are doing all the things that are required to keep their users safe. However, they are not, as it is in their interests to keep us scrolling, clicking and making them money. The top engineering and neuroscientists who are making these apps against your willpower is hardly an even match so it is no wonder we are being subsumed into the online vortex so much.

Wigley includes a lot of information on how we consume our current digital diets. I don’t think we realise just how much time we all spend on screens of one form or another each day; it is quite shocking really. The way that the younger generation communicates is very different to how we used to do so, most of them have lots of messaging apps open and find the face to face communication far more difficult. Whilst an instant message may be easy to send, it is very easy to misinterpret a short pithy one-liner, something that is harder in front of someone as we pick up lots of visual clues from the person we are talking to. These modern apps are designed to be addictive, the amount of time my children spend on YouTube and Twitch is quite shocking. I use YouTube to listen to music a lot, but I am not watching the videos as it is on in the background.

This addiction is giving us what Barak Obama called an empathy deficit. It is not that we don’t care, but these devices are overwhelming us with their demands. We need that empathy as a society, it is the glue that binds us together. Companies providing the most addictive apps tend to aim for getting dopamine release that internal drug that you get from pleasurable moments. Experts are worried was this continual release of the drug is doing to our children’s brains. He explores how Generation Z is doing with regards to relationships and how the landscape of love and sexuality is changing. They are also changing the way we eat; the big brands are being nudged aside by this generation as they seek authentic companies to spend their money with; that is coupled with a greater environmental awareness that I think will change the political landscape in years to come.

I wouldn’t say I liked this book, Wigley talks about some very difficult subjects about the way that we interact with technology. However, I would say this should be essential reading for those that have children and who let them use technology to keep them occupied when you are doing other things. It has a clear structure to the book and he has obviously done his research well as he lays out his arguments on the positive and negatives of our device addiction and argues for the abolition of anonymity online which I had not really considered before. Well worth reading as it will make you think about how we use these devices.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Who are you?

It is a legitimate question that may have several answers depending upon where you are at that particular moment in time. People modify their behaviour depending on who they are with and where they are. Your work persona is different to the one in the pub, for example.

The same applies online, a good example of which was started by Dolly Parton where she had four images of herself that represented the ideal image for four social media platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Tinder. The meme went viral, with lots of people interpreting it in their own way. The way that our lives have changed as we are spending much more time online is changing our identities in ways that we have not even considered.

You know who you are and you are probably fortunate in that there is probably something in your home that means that you can identify yourself should you need to. However, around the world that are around a billion people who do not have that luxury so back in 2015, The United Nations committed to reaching a number of development goals, including clause 16.9, ‘Providing legal identity for all’. But how do you set about doing that in a world that you need to be running in, not to be left behind.

One country that has made a strong start in integrating real and online identities is Estonia. They realised back in 1994 that the online world was going to mesh with the real world and have set many things up, such as blockchain and i-voting to enable an online presence. Anyone in the world can apply to be an e-resident of the country and that gives you certain rights. Lots of things here are online now, I have renewed my passport, paid car tax and signed numerous petitions in the vain hope of influencing the political overlords. Most of those have been in vain though…

Tying all of these things together in a virtual environment is proving challenging as private companies have different ID requirements to the government who all seem to have their own specific requirements. As complicated as this is there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of plans should some part of the data that you use to identify yourself be compromised. This data can be used for good and bad, Follows, an example of the way that South Korea used personal data to control and manage the Covid pandemic is as impressive as it is worrying.

When it hasn’t descended into a cesspit, social media can sometimes be great. In amongst its many faults is the problem with the younger generation seeing the ‘celebrities’ and influencers people often feel inadequate and left out and how they are creating two accounts, a ‘Rintsa’ one where you present the image that you want to portray to the outside world and a ‘Finsta’ account that is the real, unadulterated you.

It is a wide-ranging book coving all sorts of details about the modern interlinked world and the challenges we face. There are chapters on replacing you, enhancing you and even destroy you, or at least your digital presence. Thankfully Follows deals with these issues in a very readable way, taking time to clearly lay out the positives and negatives of our fast-changing lives. If you have any form of digital presence then this is essential reading.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Laurence Mitchell really didn’t have a plan for this walk, rather the aim was to drift west from his home on the east coast with the intention of ending up in Wales at some indeterminant point in the future. He did want to head back to some of the places that held memories for him though and also to explore other places that he had passed in the car and knew little about. The route that he didn’t want to plan, was suddenly coming together.

He decided to begin in Great Yarmouth, and more specifically from the Britannia Monument. His wife and he took advantage when it was open to the public on the annual heritage weekend and they could climb the 217 steps to the top. Being Norfolk is was one of the highest points around and he could see the spit of sand that Yarmouth was based around. He turns inland and looks at the silver snake of Breydon Water. He would be heading in that direction in a few days along the Wherryman’s Way.

Mitchell was not going to attempt the whole walk in one go, life and other things were going to mean that it wasn’t possible. Rather he undertakes it in several sections and the first day’s walk was around seven to eight miles and ended up at the Berney Arms pub. He caught a train back to Norwich he returns a week later to walk onwards again. This time he would be walking alone and back to his home in Norwich. It is not long before he is walking into the Fens, a part of the county that he has only really seen from a car or train window. It is a reminder that sometimes we need to get to know where we live a little better.

The second part of the walk is in the Midlands, a place that he knows well as he grew up in Redditch. It was way back in his memories but had changed a lot since he left, so it felt like he was visiting a new place. Gone is the heavy industry and there are still traces of it left if you know where to look. Even though it was close to the urban centre of Birmingham the people of Redditch were independently minded and they still are.

Wales is the final part of his journey. He picks up the walk again after the winter heading back to Clun in May. He walks over rather than along Offa’s Dyke, the original border between England and Wales and finds himself walking along the Kerry Ridgeway, a path that predates the Iron Age. Wales is a place of memories, holidays and days out from home when he was younger. The pace is slower here because of the hills but it is not long before he will be in Aberystwyth.

It seems strange reading about travelling in the times before the pandemic, normal conversations were had, he eats in restaurants. Well, you know what I mean. This is no Great Walk, rather this is a lovely paced memoir with a lovely mix of travel, personal memoir and anecdote and with potted histories of the places he passes. It is also a glimpse of a part of the country that I know very little about. One of the places that he passes through is on my list to visit one day, Sutton Cheney. (I have to really). It even has a bibliography, a lot of which I know about, but some of which I haven’t read, yet.

5 out of 5 stars

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

There are parts of the New Forest that have not changed in the past thousand years since the land was seized by the new monarch, William the Conqueror, nee Bastard and he made is one of his new hutting forests. It is not heavily wooded, rather it is a delightful mix of woodlands, heathlands and other habitats. Bar the few roads that cross it and small towns there has been very little development on the landscape, wildlife that is rare in other parts of the south can often be found here.

It is a place that Neil Ansell has known since childhood. He grew up in Portsmouth fairly close to the area and would spend days there watching all sorts of wildlife and immersing himself in the natural world. This is a trip back through his own memories of childhood and a self pilgrimage to find the place that had such a long-lasting impact on the direction of his life.

He begins in January on the heath at Shatterford; it is bitter and a strong wind isn’t helping either. The sun glinting off the ice does add a certain magic. Just pausing long enough to look at the fractal patterns on the pond is enough to bring the birds out from where they had been hiding as he had walked up, stonechats and then in the sky, a raven. He follows the trail onward and pauses again to sit on a fallen branch. He takes in what is around and then sees a bird perched on top of a dead birch, a shrike.

It is wiser to go out with my eyes wide open, to fully appreciate what is actually there, rather than ending up regretting what is absent.

He returns each month to the forest just to be there really. Some visits have a specific aim; to find a place that was once a memory, but mostly he is there just to walk aimlessly and see where it leads him. By visiting regularly, he gets a better sense of the way that the seasons fade into each other. There are moments though where you sense that another pivot has been reached, the return of a particular migrant, the first flower from a plant that wasn’t there the last time he passes and the first butterflies floating about.

The journey there takes him past where he grew up and each time the train stops at Cosham, he has a nervous feeling as the memories pour back. He didn’t have an unhappy childhood, but the events at the time set in motion the direction of his life and have determined where he ended up now. With this, he draws in a tangle of other threads about the natural world, travellers and strong thoughts on who now owns the land of our country.

The goal is not to walk through a landscape, but to walk into it. The point of a walk is not to reach the end but to reach the middle. To find the centre of things, and soak it all in.

As with his other books this is a joy to read. It is more reflective than his other books, he is recounting past memories of his childhood trips there and tries to find the places that made such a distinct impression on him in his formative years. It is more political than his other books, I think that he has reached a point where he sees birds and animals disappearing that he used to see a few decades ago and rightly feels that we are doing bugger all about it. I do like to that that he is not a specialist in any particular field, rather he is there to absorb the rhythms of the natural world on his wanders through the forest. His steady hearing loss means that the sounds of some birds and the whisper of the wind through the trees are lost to him forever, but this has sharpened his observational skills. It is another wonderful book from Ansell and I can highly recommend it.

5 out of 5 stars

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

It took me a while to work out the best place to see swifts here in Dorset, there are rarely above my house. Instead, I found them near the River Stour that I spent many hours by during the first lockdown. They were very high up and I wasn’t paying a huge amount of attention as I was enjoying the sunset more. First I thought the black shapes were bats, but when I looked closely I realised that they were moving far too quickly to be bats, not only that they rarely flapped their wings. Then I looked properly.

Swifts!

They were collecting bugs at dusk and swooping and banking in their distinct way. hey were such a joy to watch that I missed the sun dropping behind the trees that night. I even tried to take some photos on my phone, but they don’t half shift!

I am not that obsessed by them compared to other people, Lev Parikian for example, or the author of this book, Charles Foster, but I can see why they both are. The arrival of swifts back in the country is a marvel of the natural world over the modern world. Waiting for Swifts to return from their African journey is probably worse than waiting for Christmas, at least we know when that day is even though it seems so far away when you’re seven. We don’t actually know what day they will fill our skies with their screaming.

Their power freedom and joy are the way everything really is – though we don’t usually see it. It is just when the swifts scream through the sky, you can’t miss it. That is how everything, all the time, is meant to be.

The first line of this book is: This is an account of an obsession. And he is not wrong either. He begins his story in January in Africa. He is full of snake and gassy African beer watching the swifts hunt for their insect food, swirling around his head so fast that the fuzziness from the alcohol means that he has trouble keeping up with them. They are masters of the air, so much so that they almost never land, always on the move, sleeping, feeding continually and even mating on the wing. The only time they touch down is to nest, lay eggs and feed their brood.

Like most animals they are under threat, In the uniquely British way we have tidied things up and the nooks and crannies that they used for their young have disappeared leaving very little options for nesting. Couple that with the desire to drench every living thing with some sort of insecticide, they are struggling to find the food that they need. To say we need to do more is a mantra that needs repeating endlessly; once they are gone they will not be coming back.

In April we find Foster in Spain, waiting on the top of a cliff for them the pass. He has been there a week and is beginning to hate the coffee, all he wants is a glimpse of them as they pass. As much as he looks though, he never sees them, until there is that scimitar flash in the very edge of his peripheral vision. They are here, passing onto the next landmark on the way home; except the UK isn’t really their home. The season of summer is where they live and they move back and forth across the planet.

‘They’re birds, for Christ’s sake!’ an ex-friend helpfully reminds me, trying to bring me back down to earth. But it’s no good: the swifts aren’t down to earth at all.

Charles Foster doesn’t like to follow convention, something that you will discover if you read, Being A Beast. His prose has an intensity that you rarely find these days; it is like having a double espresso directly in through the eyeballs! His passion, sorry obsession, about these birds is almost addictive and is starting to rub off on his family too. This is a wonderful book about these aerial wizards of the skies and the stunning sketches and artwork by Jonathan Pomeroy make this a perfect book.

4 out of 5 stars

If you were to compress the entire life span of the earth on a clock face, then humanity would only appear in the final two minutes. The two hundred thousand years that we have been around as a species is almost no time at all compared to the 4.5 billion years that the earth has existed as a planet.

For most people getting a grip of how vast geological or deep time, takes a lot of doing. Ten thousand years ago, a mere moment in this timescale, we were still connected to mainland Europe. To see this deep time laid out before us we need to look at the rocks.

Helen Gordon has an obsession with one type of rock, chalk. She had headed out of London to the North Downs just to get some space and thinking time. Near Caterham, she came across a board explaining that the ground she was standing on was once the bed of an ocean around the time of the dinosaurs. Amazed, she decided to find out more so when back in London headed to the Natural History Museum. She looked at the dusty exhibits and wanted to know more. Books on geology led to field trips learning more about the rocks below our feet that tell the story of the deep time of our country and planet.

Finding out more will take her from the glamour of Cambridge Heath Road, to see ice cores in Copenhagen, the Siccar Point to see the place where a man called James Hutton had looked at the granites and sandstones and realised that the earth was much, much older than 75,000 years. She heads to the deserts of America to see where dinosaurs once trod and spends time in Naples learning about volcanos.

I really enjoyed this. If you want a well written and nicely balanced introduction to the field of geology and deep time you cannot go wrong starting with this book. Gordon mages to make this vast subject approachable and also reminds us that we are a mere footnote in history, the planet will continue with or without us.

3 out of 5 stars

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

Linda Gask has had an interesting and varied life. She retired from being a consultant psychiatrist in the National Health Service and an academic at the University of Manchester a number of years ago. She is now Emerita Professor of Primary Care Psychiatry at the University of Manchester. In the past, she has advised the World Health Organisation and was awarded the President’s Medal by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2017.

To work at that high level you would expect someone who is driven and level headed, but she has suffered from anxiety and depression throughout her life. After she retired she decided to make her home in Orkney, her husband still had commitments down south so they would be enduring separate lives for the foreseeable future. She moves in slowly bringing items from their home in Yorkshire all the while wondering how this abode will cope with the relentless weather that sweeps in all year round. As they talk over Skype, John sees that she is relapsing into another period of mental illness.

It is a challenging time for both of them, John’s mother is admitted to a care home and he still wants to stay near her so they only have a certain amount of time together before he has to head back to Yorkshire. They have always wanted to live in Scotland, but circumstances mean that this isn’t possible at the moment and that isn’t helping with her anxiety. Slowly things begin to change though and a combination of medicines and hope help lift her from her blackest period.

This is a very personal memoir of a life spent helping others with their mental health issues whilst at the same time suffering from her own mental health issues. It did give her an insight into what the patients in her care were suffering from and almost certainly meant that she was in a better place to be able to help them recover. I had hoped for more of the place that she has chosen to live with her husband, Orkney. It is there in the book, but only as a landscape glimpsed occasionally in the narrative, but she does bring its bleak beauty alive in her prose.

4 out of 5 stars

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

I have not yet been fortunate to see a Manx Shearwater, but they are a fascinating bird from all that I have read about them. They are moderately sized birds with a wingspan of around 80cm and weigh approximately 400g. They nest and breed on islands on the west coast of the UK that are free from rats. After breeding they abandon the chick in the burrow and make the 8000-mile journey to the South Atlantic just off Argentina.

Morgan -Grenville first came across them when he used to stay with his grandmother at her croft on the Island of Mull. While they were staying they were expected to help around the place in the mornings, pulling ragwort, hefting sacks of seaweed and equally hard but necessary jobs. That done the afternoon was time for adventure; climbing hills, swimming and having tea with some of her eccentric friends. One special treat was being taken out in a boat to see the puffins. It was on one of these trips that he noticed this bird just above the water and wasn’t quite sure what it was. The skipper of the boat told him it was a shearwater and his life was never quite the same again.

Thirteen years later and he is on his way to South Georgia for military duty. He has just stepped out from the bridge as he felt rather nauseous. He thought about the letter he has just received from his grandmother, he always saved it until last when he noticed a bird in the distance, his first albatross and a veteran bird too by the looks of it. He had the same feeling when he saw the shearwater and it set a question in his mind that he would spend the next thirty years answering: What happens with those ocean birds when they go out of sight?

This book is his story to seek the answers to that question and it will take him back to the places of his childhood, the tiny island of Lundy and all the way to South America. He helps with the research team on the Island of Skomer and sits waiting in a bar in Ireland waiting for a storm to pass.

I thought this was another step up from his previous book, Liquid Gold. This is part memoir, part travelogue and you can tell that this is a bird that he is obsessed with, from the story that he tells within the pages. The prose is rich and full of personal moments that do not detract from the book at all. Not quite a funny as his previous book, the narrative is a fitting tribute to these amazing birds and his fiercely independent grandmother.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Our wildlife in the UK is suffering more than ever before. The onslaught of modern life, intolerant landowners and farmers that are pushed to try and make a living mean that our wildlife has been pushed to the fringes like nothing before. Animals, such as the hedgehog that was once commonplace are now on the endangered list. There are eleven other mammals on the red list a full 25% of our native species.

Hearing things like this can make people feel helpless, but there are things that we can do to help out those that are most critical. In this book, Dominic Couzens has chosen thirty animals that are on this list and has written a little about them and specific issues that they are facing and most importantly has got lots of practical ideas and suggestions as to how we can help these creatures.

Starting with the hedgehog, a cute prickly mammal that most people are fond of, he details ways in which homeowners can help these little hogs. There are simple things like not using slug bait, leaving a small(ish) patch untidy and not digging up your lawn. Check piles of rubbish before disposing of and a new thing that is happening in my area, creating gaps to make a hedgehog highway.

The plants that you put in your garden can make a big difference, we all know about plants for pollinators, but adding in night-scented plants attracts moths, which in turn brings in those wonderful flying mammals, bats. There are other animals that you might not come across as you look out your kitchen windows like dolphins and hen harriers, but there are many suggestions on how you can help these too, including reducing plastic use and making sure it is properly disposed of, choosing fish in the supermarket that have been caught sustainably. Joining wildlife trusts and picking a particular society of an animal that you love is another way of helping. All monies in these societies are put towards helping in the best way possible.

I thought that this was a really nicely put together book. Couzens has lots of sensible ideas and practical things that you can do to help and you don’t often have to spend a lot of money either. The drawings by Sarah Edmonds add a really nice touch to this too. Buy it, read it and do something about it.