Category: Review (Page 42 of 132)

4 out of 5 stars

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

On the 23rd March 2020, the UK entered lockdown. Overnight everything changed for the country. Travel for essential items was only permitted, everything except food shops and a handful of others deemed essential were open. We were allowed an hour of exercise per day outside but we were to stay and work from home.

Even though Stephen Moss mostly works from home now, but in normal time there are events in bookshops, Birdfair and other foreign trips that were all cancelled as the pandemic swamped out lives. Whilst he has seen many birds on his local patch, he would normally be of look elsewhere for all manner of different birds. Life for the foreseeable future would be different.

Written in a weekly diary form, this is his account of life under lockdown and the rediscovery of his local patch and accounts of the many walks and rides that he took around what he calls the loop, a three-mile. After a week of lockdown, he noticed that the volume and intensity of birdsong whilst cycling around the loop. But he didn’t know whether it was that the regular distractions of modern life would normally stop him noticing or that the silence of planes and cars made their songs sound louder. He was not the only one to notice this and he appeared on the Today programme to talk about how the dawn chorus was soothing the nation.

After a couple of weeks he had developed a routine, he would emerge from his garden office having completed some work and join his wife, Suzanne, and their dog, Rosie for morning coffee in the garden. They would scan the skies for raptors and they would often see them in the distance wheeling around on the thermals. A few days later he heard a tawny owl hoot just as he was going to bed, something that he wasn’t sure he’d hear again after finding a dead one nearby.

Being confined to his locality was becoming special in lots of ways, rather than passing things by in the rush to get somewhere else, he was taking the time to get to know his local patch intimately and gain that deep-rooted sense of place that naturalists like John Clare experienced. As lockdown begins to ease, he is able to move further afield and meet up with friends elsewhere on the Somerset levels. But it is the regular trips around the loop that he grows most fond of. Moving at a slow walking pace with Rosie he starts to learn individual birds habits, when and where they will be singing from as well. It is a tonic for his soul every day.

It has been one of the strangest periods of my life, and whilst it feels that we are getting back to normal, there is still a way to go. Moss’s book on how he coped with the pandemic is a wonderful response to this strange time and I really enjoyed this book. Moss is on top form in his prose as ever when writing about the wildlife that he sees on his walks and cycle rides. It is probably his most political book too; he gets really angry about the response from the government to the pandemic fairly often! Highly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Twenty years ago I remember seeing a Grand Designs programme for a stunning property. Known as the Cruciform House, this amazing building was a perfect marriage between oak and glass. It sparked an interest in oak framed buildings, learning how they were built, that some of the techniques used in building these structures are having to be relearnt. One day I would love to be able to afford to build my own, but it isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

When craftsman, Robert Somerville moved to Hertfordshire, in the home counties, he discovered by accident an ancient barn nearby in a place called Wallington. He was fascinated by the way the pre-industrial revolution craftsmen had made and constructed this barn and it had a literary link too, it was the inspiration for Animal Farm by George Orwell.

He was commissioned to make a small barn in a traditional way, but his clients had an unusual request. They wanted this to be a hand raised barn. They had been involved in a previous barn project and wanted this to be a project where volunteers could also join in and learn some life and practical skills. Somerville was as committed as they were to the project.

Until I picked this book up, I didn’t realise two things; one, that you could build a structure with elm, second, that there are still elms tree left! But Somerville knows where to look in the vicinity and manages to source the trees that he needs to start the project. They are going to have lots of volunteers with very different skill levels working on the site, they made the decision not to use any power tools for safety reasons. It is a decision that has lots of benefits, the biggest of which is that it becomes a social event as people can talk over the sound of hand tools, something that they would be able to do with power tools.

I thought that this was a really enjoyable book, Somerville takes you through every step of the processes of making a tree into a barn. He shows what trees to choose, and how to select the component parts from the trunk and branches and there are outline plans, details on how to build the plinths, how to make the frames and details on how to make the joints all done with delightful line drawings. I thought that It was very well written, he is generous with his knowledge with all the people that volunteered and us the reader. The structure that they build is beautiful and looking at it makes me want to find out if there is anything similar to this going to be happening in Dorset. If you have any interest in architecture or traditional crafts then you would probably like this. It is well worth watching the video on YouTube here

4 out of 5 stars

Perry and Gail were on a much needed holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Perry was a big tennis player and along with the slightly overweight pro he had arranged a game with a honeymoon couple from India. It was a close-fought game and they even managed to draw a small crowd.

One of those watching was a Russian called Dima. He is a slightly aloof character, but he oozes power. He wants to play a game of tennis too and Perry reluctantly agrees. With Dima is his family, but also has an entourage of heavies that are there to ensure that their man is well protected. Dima has made his fortune in money laundering, and in deeply immersed in lucrative and very dodgy deals with the Russian mafia. His connections in the webs of high finance even reach into the British political elite and he has begun to realise that his position is a huge liability as he knows too many people.

Dima needs a sympathetic Englishman to put him in touch with the MI6 and with, Perry, he has struck it lucky. They reluctantly agree to help and take a USB stick back home with them. He knows a friend of a friend who is something important is the secret world and passes it onto them. He thinks that he has done his bit, but both Dima and MI6 want him and Gail to be the go-between and common point of contact. They never wanted to be spies; now they are in the secret world way over their heads.

I won’t give any more plot details away except that Le Carre has done it again with this book. It doesn’t have the same suspense or feeling of dread as his earlier books do though; this is more of a moral tale and most importantly a warning as to what the city (still) is doing by attracting vast sums of dirty money to be laundered through its systems. It is permeated with spycraft and dealings between those at the firm who realise that the asset they have secured is going to disrupt the cosy and very lucrative financial dealings that the city is looking forward to doing with the Russians. It doesn’t make it any less readable though and he is the master of the unexpected.

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for Notebook by Tom Cox and published by Unbound.

About the Book

Sure, sex is great, but have you ever cracked open a new notebook and written something on the first page with a really nice pen? The story behind Notebook starts with a minor crime: the theft of Tom Cox’s rucksack from a Bristol pub in 2018. In that rucksack was a journal containing ten months worth of notes, one of the many Tom has used to record his thoughts and observations over the past twelve years. It wasn’t the best he had ever kept – his handwriting was messier than in his previous notebook, his entries more sporadic – but he still grieved for every one of the hundred or so lost pages. This incident made Tom appreciate how much notebook-keeping means to him: the act of putting pen to paper has always led him to write with an unvarnished, spur-of-the-moment honesty that he wouldn’t achieve on-screen. Here, Tom has assembled his favourite stories, fragments, moments and ideas from those notebooks, ranging from memories of his childhood to the revelation that ‘There are two types of people in the world. People who f*cking love maps, and people who don’t.’ The result is a book redolent of the real stuff of life, shot through with Cox’s trademark warmth and wit.

About the Author

Tom Cox lives in Norfolk. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling The Good, The Bad and The Furry and the William Hill Sports Book longlisted Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia. 21st-Century Yokel was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, and the titular story of Help the Witch won a Shirley Jackson Award.

My Review

Sometimes the most mundane of objects can be the most precious. Tom Cox found this out one day when his rucksack was stolen in a pub in Bristol. It was one of several that were left alongside the dancefloor and was probably the scruffiest and grubbiest of all of them there. Inside were £46 his debit card, a novel, car keys, phone and charger and a black Moleskine notebook. He had a fraught 24 hours sorting things out, getting back home for the spare car keys and having to rely on the generosity of friends.

The memory of the things that were taken have long since faded, but the thing that he misses the most, even now, was the notebook. In there were his most random and intimate thoughts about anything and everything that he considered worthy of committing to paper. Not only has he got a gap in all the notebooks that he has ever had, it felt like amnesia that he could never recover.

A solid cooking rule to follow is to remember that when recipes say ‘add two cloves of garlic’, it’s always a misprint and what they actually mean is six.

Whilst there wasn’t notes for a specific book in its pages, there were notes that might appear in some form or other in something that he was yet to write. He would often discover these musings as he flicked back and forwards through his notebooks and be able to expand on them for the book he was currently writing. A lot of the stuff he scribbles down though is not really for publication, but some of it is and this is what appears in these pages.

‘Weird’ very rarely means ‘weird’. A lot of the time it’s just a word that boring people use to describe people with an imagination.

Having a glimpse inside someone’s mind can be a thing of terror! Thankfully in the case of Tom Cox, the musings repeated in here are as random as they are wide-ranging. There is gentle humour and profound insight into that particular day’s observation. One moment you are reading about what he is going to do with the 3000 courgettes that he has bought back from his parents home, the next about haircuts. There are snippets on books, words, spiders, mugs, cats, February and maps. There is of course his dad in the note, as loud as ever, and his mum had created the art that prefaces the beginning of each chapter.

Drunk people rarely make good romantic choices. The problem is where the drinking takes place. Bookshops, that’s where people should drink.

Like Cox, I have a thing for notebooks too. I do have nine others that I have bought and not yet used. I am currently using a Star Wars Moleskine. Along with notebooks, I do have a thing for decent pens and pencils and I normally use a uni-ball eye micro and have a drawer full of Staedtler pencils. I must admit that I am a big fan of Tom Cox too, in particular his books on natural history and landscape that take a very different perspective on writing about the outdoors compared to other authors. This book is very different from those, but in lots of ways, it is the same. His unconventional way of looking at life is evident through those snippets they have selected for inclusion in here and it is a joy to read.

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour

Buy this at your local independent bookshop. If you’re not sure where your nearest is then you can find one here

My thanks to Anne Cater from Random Thing Tours for arranging a copy of the book to read.

4 out of 5 stars

In the thousands of years since we stopped becoming hunter-gatherers and we have changed almost everything on the planet in one way or another. We have drained and flooded places, destroyed mountains, built brand new hills, changed the course of rivers, dug deep into the earth and obliterated whole cities. When we move on to the next places what then for the places we have trashed and ruined?

Rather than travelling to all the beauty spots in the world, In Islands of Abandonment Cal Flyn decides to head to all those places that most people wouldn’t be adding to their list of places to go after lockdown. As well as finding ruin and devastation, she also finds strange beauty, rare plants and nature starting to take back what is once owned.

Starting very close to home, she heads to a place called Five Sisters. This place in West Lothian is a series of hills that are the waste from shattering rocks to extract the shale oil from. When they were created they were a grim, dark site, but now they are now a soft green as life has found a foothold on their steep slopes. The vegetation is similar to what you would find on a tundra but after the site was surveyed in 2004 a biologist was startled to find that in amongst the willow herb there were some incredibly rare plants indeed, including the Young’s Helleborine and other orchids.

Borders that have been created following disputes in Korea and Cyprus are two places that are on her destination list. In Cyprus, she meets with a man who had to flee his home in 1974 and though that he would be back in a few days. He still hasn’t returned and he can see his former home through the fence. The DMZ between North and South Korea has almost become a wildlife sanctuary in its own right with various large mammals now being spotted.

In Spain there are now around 3000 villages that the populations have abandoned for the cities are slowly crumbling into dust and being reclaimed by nature. The same thing is happening in Detroit. They call it blight; gone are the industries of the region and the employment that it brought. Entire streets have been left as the people have moved elsewhere and Flyn has included some photo from Google Streetview as they are reclaimed by scrub and trees.

Landscapes have been irrevocably changed by disasters both natural and man-made. At the time of writing this both Mount Etna and another unpronounceable one in Iceland are very active at the moment. Being shown round the remains of a town that was covered after a volcano blew its top off is an eye-opening experience. For man-made disasters, there is little to touch Chernobyl for its impact in Ukraine and across the continent. I distinctly remember it happening way back in the 1980s and I am not sure what was the most disturbing, the disinformation and propaganda from the Soviets or the vast cloud of radiation drifting across the UK. The exclusion zone around the plant is slowly being reclaimed by nature and the scientists are still learning how the massive dose of radiation is still affecting the region.

In nearby Estonia, there are vast swathes of farmland that has been abandoned and Flyn sees how the landscapes are slowly re-foresting themselves. It is becoming a massive carbon sink and in some ways replacing the trees being lost from the Amazon. A completely different place is Slab City, this desert community is a place that those in our society who don’t really fit, or in certain cases are trying to evade the authorities end up. It is a bit of a lawless place and feels a bit, Mad Max.

Some of the places that she travels to are pretty grim, a reminder of the worst that we can do to this only planet that we have. Thankfully Flyn is a sensitive and perceptive writer, she engages with the people that she meets at the places mentioned and visited in the book and her detailed background research adds depth to the prose making this a fascinating study of the places around the planet.

2 out of 5 stars

In the rural community of Lincoln, Illinois a farmer is murdered after a neighbouring farmer shoots him. The community is shocked by this and again by the second tragedy that was to befall them soon after. What is left of the two families are left to patch up their lives and the case is soon forgotten about. Except by the narrator of the story. He was almost friends with the son of one of the deceased and the memories of the time still weight heavily in his mind.

Fifty years later, he decides that he wants to fill in the gaps of what happened at the time. He writes off to the local paper for copies of the articles that were written at the time and eventually gets a set of articles sent to him. It felt like looking at history through the wrong end of a set of binoculars. In amongst the $7 suit adverts of the time were the nuggets of information that washed over him as a child. As he starts to go back over the events that led up to this double tragedy he realises that he has more questions than answers now.

Even though I have only given this two stars, there were some parts of this novella that I liked, the prose is taut and sparse, he has barely wasted a letter in the writing of this. It felt at times a little like Of Mice and Men the way he portrayed the sense of place that you get from reading it. I could see the fields that the community lived in and sense the bleakness from the uniformity of it all. The main problem that I had with it was that it didn’t feel cohesive to me. It jumps back and forwards and you find out almost immediately about the murder and the remainder of the book is spent with the narrator exploring and trying to understand what happened all those years ago and coming to terms with his guilt.

3 out of 5 stars

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

One of the things that differentiate us from the majority of the animal kingdom is our use and development of tools that aid us in doing all manner of things. Just on my desk are a plethora of items that have been invented by someone at some point in history. Just take the pencil, it first came about in 1564 in the UK as a piece of graphite. Then the Italians wrapped that in wood to stop getting their hands dirty. Two hundred years after that, the Austrians added clay to the graphite and came up with what we would recognise today.

Ross has split these human achievements into seven sections, In the Beginning, At Home, Health and Medicine, Getting About, Science and Engineering, Peace and War and Culture. The first section is the shortest, more of a marking of time until carbon-based bipeds became the human beings of today. Each section that follows has reams of facts and dates of items and subjects as diverse as door locks, blood groups, kites, bridges and diplomacy and evening the space hopper (remember those?).

I did like this, but in essence, this is a great big list that is full of facts and dates. Sadly there is very little context as to how the thing was first begun or invented and how the subsequent inventions were derived from previous items. That said, that is not the point of this book, if you need that extra depth of information then consult an encyclopaedia of original source of material for more detail. It would be a great source for those doing quizzes.

4.5 out of 5 stars

One of the pleasures that I discovered from lockdown was the pleasure of sitting by the water, It is a dynamic medium that changes constantly during the day, it reflects the weather, moves as the breeze ripples the surface and is never the same each moment.

Way back in 2012, Clare Best and the artist Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis went in search of the water on the South Downs. There had been a drought that year that meant that the wells, furnace ponds, pools and dew ponds that they were looking for had more of less vanished, leaving only the faintest glimpse of their watery origins. Though the water was scarce, what they did find was the landscape that told the stories of those that had worked there as well as the richness of the natural world that of was claiming it back.

Now streams and lakes
Are lucent, hushed –
No hammers, no forges,
No cannon, no soot,
But fire that smoulders
In rusty pools

This beautifully laid out is split into three sections, the first is poetry, then there are short essays from other writers and their response to the landscape of the chalk down and watery places elsewhere in the country. They have also sourced artworks from a private collection that are just wonderful.

The poems are as sparse as they are beautiful. Coupled with Aytoun-Ellis’s artworks this makes a beautiful book to have and to hold. One to be dipped into again and again I think

Three Favourite Poems

How Water Comes Through

Ironmakers

Interval

4 out of 5 stars

They were flying over an endless desert at 220mph. It stretched to the horizon from both windows. Rather than feeling excited about the flight into Baghdad, Maxwell felt a touch of fear. This journey had begun a couple of years before when he had written to the man sitting alongside him on the plane, they met in London. He explained there would be no home comforts and it would be incredibly tough travelling. In the end, he agreed to take him the next time he was going there. That man dozing alongside him was the legendary explorer Wilfred Thesiger and this was to be Maxwell’s first trip to the marshes of southern Iraq.

It was a place where outsiders were treated with suspicion, and not many ventured into their waterscape made up of a mass of tiny islands in a maze of reeds and swamps. They stopped for a few days in Basra where they were joined by the lads that Thesiger used to help him navigate the wilderness. They then all piled into a car and headed south before turning off the road and heading to where the lads had left their canoe. Finally, he was heading into the marshes.

Under a storm sky this landscape, too, could seem bleak and terrible, but now it seemed a wonderland, and the colours had the brilliance and clarity of fine enamel.

He would accompany Thesiger as he visited the various places that he wanted to go on this visit. They would only stay one night before moving on to another home so they didn’t become too much of a burden on their host. Moving across the water in a shallow draught canoe when the wind was blowing a gale is a bit nerve-wracking; especially if the local guides seemed to be worried too.

Maxwell is quite a good shot on land, shooting coots and ducks while sitting cross-legged in a gently rocking canoe is another matter. Sometimes he got lucky and sometimes he didn’t. As honoured guests, they attend weddings, watch dancers and share stories around the buffalo dung fires in the evenings. He watches how they construct their houses, and make the reed matting that is used for all manner of things.

It was a landscape as weird as a Lost World, and through it flew birds as strange and unfamiliar in flight as pterodactyls; snake-necked African darters, pygmy cormorants and halcyon kingfishers

The is the final book following on from Thesiger’s classic and Gavin Young’s Return To The Marshes in the triage of books I read about the Marsh Arabs. I think that I liked them all about the same but for a variety of different reasons. Thesiger and Young came across as more seasoned travellers, but in A Reed Shaken by the Wind, you got the sense that Maxwell was a little out of his depth travelling in the region for the first time.

Whilst he may have been outside his comfort zone, his prose can be magnificent at times. He has an eye for details about the people, their sparse but simple homes, the weather and the watery landscapes they are traversing in the canoes. I felt more of a sense of how it felt to be in the region more than with the other two authors. It was here too that he was to become the owner of an otter cub, Mijbil and the author of a book that would make him famous.

4 out of 5 stars

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

There are a diverse set of plots in this collection, from a man still mourning the death of his brother all those years ago and trying to understand just what happened on that day. There is Peter showing a previous resident around the home that he has just bought with his boyfriend and that they are just starting to renovate. A man who is in between jobs is staying at an apartment in Rome and he is called upon to help after an earthquake strikes the region. Another story tells of a brief dalliance with another lady who was working at the same supermarket as him before they went their own separate ways in the world once again.

Set in all parts of the world, all of the stories have richly formed characters and there is enough detail of each of them for you to be able to grasp their backstory as they are thrust deep into the plot. They feel like real people too, not wildly implausible characters, doing real, mundane things and experiencing the joys and pains of life.

I thought that there were some really good stories in this collection of thirteen by Mort. They are not always cheerful, so if you are looking for something uplifting at the moment, others might be more appropriate. Three of my favourite stories were Saint Peter, Pepe’s and Oliva, which I thought was superb.