Category: Review (Page 47 of 132)

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 image we have of spies has long been tarnished by Bond. It is not a glamourous job and often involves long hours watching and waiting for a target or asset to make a move. For those that collates the information gather from signals intelligence or actual observations have to try and place the pieces together is some semblance of order. This is not particularly easy, especially when you don’t know what the full picture is nor do you know if the snippet of information in front of you actually relates to the task in hand.

Somehow they manage to pull together a picture of what is happening. So how do they do it? One of the methods that they use is the SEES model

Situational Awareness
Explanation
Estimates
Strategic Notice

The first part is gaining a fuller understanding as you are able to of what is happening. The second part is a deep understanding as to why it is happening and the various motivations behind any parties involved. From that, you need to assess different scenarios of what might happen if events unfold in particular ways. The final element is the assessment of any issues that might affect the item under consideration, including events that might be considered as outliers at the moment.

Even though these four stages sound fairly simple, they can absorb a lot of time and effort and things still get missed. It is also important to think of all possible outcomes as the assumptions that are made are often not bold enough. In this book, Omand takes us through the process behind this system in ten lessons and provides lots of examples of how he used these techniques in his time in government and as the director of GCHQ.

It is very detailed, which is kind of what I would expect from someone of his calibre and experience in the role. There are some really useful lessons in here, especially the final lesson on digital subversion and sedition and that seeing is not always believing, especially with the sophisticated. Parts of the book did feel like there were more of a memoir of his time in various government departments and was loosely linked to the lesson being discussed. That was a minor detail though, there are lots of details to take away here and use.

4 out of 5 stars

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

The islands of Fuji deep in the Pacific were known as the Cannibal Isles. It was a feared place by many, and they were subject to many influxes of Europeans and Indians over the past 150 years. These slavers, traders, missionaries and those with imperial intentions all had planned on what to do with the islands and its people. The Fijians absorbed these people and have emerged out of the other side with their society, language and lands intact and still their own.

In the early 1980s, Ronald Wright arrived there with his companion, Derek. It was much less of a shock that when he had arrived in Lima together. Even at 3 am the airport seems to be organised and refined and this could be seen in the landscape as they headed out to their hotel. After breakfast Derek popped out to get a paper and appeared back with a young Indian called Krishna, he was offering to be their taxi driver for the day. Setting off they arrived at a cultural centre and had guided tour of a village. The houses were arranged in a circle and it was so quiet they could hear the sounds of the waves.

It’s hard to be a Methodist after eating one

They would spend their time there travelling around to the different islands and learning first hand about the history and culture of the islanders, meeting various people and seeing different places. Cannibalism was a ritual that was carried out to both honour and insult a person and Wright recounts details from his visit to the museum. They developed a unique culture, and they have thankfully still had it for the most part (they have stopped eating people now!).

Most Fujian’s believe that rapid urbanisation, industrialisation and economic advance would cost them their cultural identity. They see land as more substantial than capital, subsistence farming more worthwhile than cash crops and they have been able to continue in these ‘old fashioned’ ways by developing a political system that defends them.

Before starting this review I spent a little while looking up some details about the islands of Fuji. All I can say is that it is utterly beautiful with their idyllic beaches and azure blue seas. Reading this, I get that impression from Wright too, that he loved being on these tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific. Even though he is moving around the islands, it doesn’t completely feel like a travel book as there is a mix of history, culture and his take of the people of Fiji. It is an interesting read though and a good starting point for anyone wanting to know a little more about the place.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

I watch much less TV than I used to, and I am very much more selective now about what I choose to watch too. I tend to prefer to watch documentaries on a variety of subjects, occasionally a drama and some humour or panel game. Much like my reading.

A lot of what passes for popular culture passes me by as I have my head in a book normally. I have seen one series of Big Brother, I think it was the second series, I don’t watch Bake Off, though the rest of my family do. I can’t bear the braying alpha males and females on the Apprentice, who seem to think that the only way to get ahead is the trample on all those around them. If fact, almost all the programmes that he references, I haven’t watched…

He has somehow managed to divide these TV programmes into five sections that loosely hang together. The first, Reality TV Reality focuses on Big Brother, the Apprentice and Britain’s Hardest Workers but he also manages to squeeze in, The Office, The Thick of It and Have I Got News For You. When Big Brother first started they took a bunch of people off the street and shut them away under the pervasive gaze of cameras and an intrigued and bemused audience. Not much happened but it was a big success. This lead to more profiling of the people selected to join in and a house that was more spikey and not quite as comfortable as the earlier series. It has made a number of people famous for no other reason than being on there. The Office was not a programme I liked. As I work in an office usually, the little I watched felt far to close to home but to pull off a drama that felt like a cringe-worthy embarrassing documentary takes some doing…

The fascination of seeing people who live differently will never go away and this sort of documentary is never going to go out of fashion. In How The Other Half Live, Harrison considers various programmes that give us a window into these other worlds. The Secret Millionaire is a programme that took the super-rich out of their opulent mansions an into the lives of ordinary people. In principle, it was a good thing, but in practice, it became a way of the show exploiting those in the lower levels of our society and probably showed as much the chasm between those at the top and bottom that is still widening.

I have watched Top Gear since William Wollard waxed lyrical over different types of engine oil and the cars they feature you could see quite often broken down of the side of the road. It was reinvented with Clarkson et al and became a lifestyle show that I must admit has made me laugh a lot. He was a man who didn’t let trivial things like facts get in the way of his opinion and he drove as close the edge as he could. In Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis, he shows how we can all retract into our particular bunkers and by consuming a niche of content from various providers we reinforce our particular world views.

The BBC is a common thread throughout the book and they merit a special chapter to themselves. Harrison goes onto list the flaws of the corporation and the way that it works, especially the delusional attempt to get a balance on every single subject they talk about. I like the BBC, even more so now that I have stopped listening to their news output, but they do make some excellent programmes on a variety of subjects.

In, A Very British Identity Crisis, he considers various programmes that show us as a culture and he begins with those programmes that have increased thousands of waistlines across the country. It feels like a country fair where villagers take their garden and kitchen produce to be judged by the great and the good. Another of the programmes that he uses as points of reference, Downton Abbey, I have never seen or wanted to see for that matter. But I completely get his point that it has been written to show that the English upper class have the right to remain in charge in perpetuity. Glad to see that he mentions the Detectorists, a show that is gently funny, but has quite deep truths in ti and shows that two men can have fallen in love with their local landscape and the history below the soil.

I thought that this was a fascination book. In my opinion, Harrison hits the mark each and every time with his analysis of how culture, society and what we watch on TV act like some grim hall of black mirrors back on society. There are contradictions, what works for one class now days is frowned on in other classes even though the behaviours are the same. There have been certain milestone programmes that have provided a stark, if not shockingly vivid image out our society and the way that it has changed for the better. He celebrates the great TV that has been produced and hopefully still will be but is also wary of those programmes that seek to shame and polarise particular sectors of our society. He rightly bemoans that we are losing that common TV conversational starters as so many people are watching very different things. If you love TV, then why not read a book on it? This is a very good place to start.

3 out of 5 stars

Falling in love is a complex and messy business, from the churning of emotions on finding someone who might be that one special person, the passion of an early relationship, the comfort of a steady companion and the turmoil and angst with there are stumbles and breaks.

Many people have written about this roller coaster of love, and Rapture is Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems about real love. These poems feel raw and are deeply laced with emotion. The poem Venus is about not being able to hold her lover in any intimate way any more but is suffering from insomnia and can watch the transit of Venus. There are poems about waking in the middle of the night and not having them there and the sorrow of not being able to use the words I love you in her vocabulary anymore.

Night clenches in its fist the moon, a stone
I wish it thrown.
I clutch the small stiff body of my phone

This is not the easiest collection to read as she pours her broken heart into these words. The way that she uses language to conjure images of the darker moments of her introspection are quite bleak. Even though it could be quite cheerless, I did like this, but not as much as some of her other collections that I have read like, The Bees.

Three Favourite Poems
Forest
Fall
Land

3.5 out of 5 stars

We don’t get many different species of birds in our garden, mostly sparrows, the odd blue tit, magpies, lots of pigeons and sometimes doves. I have seen herons on the house behind, and every now and again we glimpse goldfinches and we even had a pair of mallards once! It is a bit of a mix, but mostly we leave them to get on with it. Move away from the houses around and suddenly there are far more birds around, buzzards and the occasional kite wheeling overhead and magnificent swift scything through the air in the height of summer.

Some of what we consider our native birds are actually visitors. Some of them fly here for what we laughingly call our summer before heading vast distances to much warmer climes during our grey winters. In this book Dilger has selected twelve of our well-known birds, the Peregrine, the Blue Tit, Tawny Owl, Robin, Kingfisher as well as some of the summer and winter visitors that we have, the Waxwing, the Puffin, the Lapwing, Bewick’s Swan, the Swallow, the Cuckoo and the bird that the book is named after, the Nightingale.

Each chapter covers a month and each of the birds has a short essay telling us the sorts of things that they would be typically doing at that time of year. In January, we read about the Bewick’s Swan who are overwintering as it is much warmer than their summer haunt of the Siberian tundra. Kingfishers are keeping a low profile near the rivers and Tawny Owls starting to defend their territory. In the same month, thousands of miles away in South Africa the swallows flit catching insects around the big game.

By the middle of the year, the days are long, and most of the birds mentioned have bred and are carrying out the thankless task of feeding their young, the lapwings are fairly self-sufficient when they hatch, the kingfishers are just starting to force their first brood out to fend for themselves and the Puffin’s egg is still being incubated. The Peregrine’s chicks are just starting to flex their flight muscles and take to the air.

As the winter closes in the summer visitors will be long gone, the chicks of the cuckoos having managed to follow the parent they have never seen back to Africa, the blue tits are emptying the nuts from your feeder and the robin’s songs have returned and the nightingale is enjoying the warmth of tropical Senegal.

In all these multiple timelines are vast numbers of facts and details, stories and anecdotes about each of the birds and it makes for fascinating reading, especially about those that migrate and how the detective work has found their routes to and from the UK. I personally I would have preferred a separate timeline for each bird through their year, rather than month by month, as I would occasionally have flick back to see what they were up to in the previous chapter. That is only a minor thing though as otherwise, it is a good concept to show how each of these birds live their own separate and intertwined lives. I did love the little sketches of each bird and the beginning of each chapter/month.

4 out of 5 stars

When the Lost Words was released back in 2017 no one ever thought that it would become a phenomenon in its own right. It was conceived after the OUP dictionary removed several words relating to the natural world and Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris collaborated to produce a stunningly beautiful book that could teach children these words again. The poems or ‘spells’ from that book were put to music and there have been jigsaws and even a game.

This second book that takes the things that worked so well in the first book, the prose and Morris’s exquisite artwork and have packaged them into the more compact version here. As in the first book they have picked animals, plants and insects such as barn owls, moths, oak goldfinches and swifts and many others that have a few verses or lines of prose and then several pages of pictures.

I did like it a lot, Macfarlane’s prose has been deliberately written to be read out loud by parents and children and relies on repetition and rhythm and often onomatopoeia to bring these creatures alive in the pages of this book. It did amuse me that this is described as pocket-sized, whilst it is much more manageable than the first edition, you would still need a fairly large pocket to carry it around in. It is a stunning book, and that is mostly because of Jackie Morris’s artwork, it is so full of life. I did like the glossary at the end of the book with images of all the creatures to be found by the eager young naturalist.

4 out of 5 stars

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

In the first lockdown this year, people started to become more aware of the wild world around them, helped by the drop in traffic, wildlife that you may not have seen or heard before would suddenly become more visible. Some of the easiest wildlife to see is birds and this book is aimed at those who have discovered that watching them can be endlessly fascinating.

In this new book out, Dominic Couzens has picked a bird for every day of the year. Some of them are obviously linked to that day in particular, so there is naturally a robin in December and birds that are more common in the summer appear in those months in the book. Quite how you only pick 366 birds from the 10,000 or so species that we still have is quite something, but Couzens has managed to get the familiar, the exotic the rare and the unusual in a really nice mix.

The first thing that I did when receiving this was to look up the bird that is on my birthday. That bird wasn’t one that I had ever heard of but it was fairly unique in one of its habits.

It is a beautifully produced book, it is printed on quality paper and feels heavy. The stunning photographs and artworks accompany all of the chosen birds, along with a small piece of text with facts and anecdotes about their behaviour or habitat or unique trait.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

A tiny scrap of a bird had fallen from a tree in a road in London and if someone hadn’t of picked it up it would have been dead by the following morning. Thirty years earlier another bird had fallen from a steeple and that was found and picked up. The bird in London was a magpie and was taken to a man called Charlie Gilmour by his girlfriend. The other was a jackdaw and it was given to his father all those years ago when he was living in some squalor in a Cornish stately home.

Charlie’s father was a man called Heathcote Williams a poet, writer and anarchist who abandoned him and his mother when he was two years old. Williams work was prolific as his life was turbulent. He has almost nothing to do with Charlie as he grew up, and he became the adopted song of the Pink Floyd guitarist, Dave Gilmour.

Charlie was fortunate that his adopted father was a stable presence, but the genes that tormented his father had a similar effect on him. He had issues with drugs and whilst at university was arrested and imprisoned for violent disorder after an incident at the Cenotaph in London. He was slowly returning to stability with

Both of these corvids would profoundly change the men in their own way.

This book is about that tormented relationship and so much more. He had been estranged from his stepsisters, but after a fleeting contact with one of them, he builds it into a healthy relationship with them both. It does feel that he is trying to replicate the chaos and anarchy that his father brought to many people’s lives. Somehow the presence of the Benzene, the name he gives to the magpie and his partner Yana is a big help with his mental stability.

It is richly layered with the complex relationship that he has with his real father. At one point in the book he is reading through Heathcote’s papers (he never calls him dad) he suddenly realises that they are very alike in the way that they react to situations, some of the things that drive him affected his father in a similar way. He makes the decision to get appointments and get the proper professional help he needs to get better.

Having read Corvus by Esther Woolfson recently, you could see some parallels to her book. In particular the stories about the magpie around the home and its daily habits and rituals and how these intelligent birds are hugely opportunistic. It was interesting to see the way that a wild bird changes and becomes partly tamed whilst living in their home and the way a tiny scrap of the natural world can calm and change a person. Overall it isn’t a bad book, there are some moments of brilliant writing in here, but for me, there was that extra something missing to make this really special.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Who we are, defines how we interact with others. Crane is one of those people who has always struggled with relationships and friendships. A relationship in the past left his with a son who he hasn’t seen in a while. A later diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome goes some way to explaining the difficulties that he had. But he still prefers his own company, hence why he lives in a remote cottage. One thing that he is passionate about though is raptors he is a self-taught falconer, learning from the book and practical experience.

It was this obsession about falcons that would take him to Pakistan. He is there to buy some of the simple but beautiful handmade bells that are made by the craftsmen there. It was a chance find online with a craftsman, that put him in touch with one of these men and after he expressed an interest in their manufacture, he was invited to visit. The trip expanded and he stayed to see the villagers fly the local goshawks, and to see first hand how they train them and seeing how the knowledge of falconry is passed from father to son.

Nine years later he has two sparrowhawks in the aviary attached to his cottage. They are called Boy and Girl, naming them would create too much of a bond as he has been training and rearing them for rehabilitation and release back into the wild. He was training these two birds at the same time that he heard that his son wanted to get back in contact with him. Both situations, he needs to think carefully about what he is doing as it would be so easy to ruin the beginnings of the relationship with his son and harm the birds as their strength builds.

I have read a fair few books on individuals using nature as a crutch or support for the troubles that they are having in their life at that particular time and this book is similar to those in many ways. Where it differs though is that Crane is mostly happy with his lot, he knows so much about raising sparrowhawks that whilst they will be a challenge, it is not out of his comfort zone. Where he does struggle though is his limitations with regards to other people, in particular, his ex-partner and their son. He finds a determined boy who knows his own mind and who has a rare perception for someone so young. I particularly liked the descriptions of his travels to Pakistan and Kazakhstan and I thought this was a well-written book that links nature and family ties together.

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 biggest single living thing on earth is not a blue whale or a redwood tree, rather it is a simple fungus. I say simple, this particular specimen of honey fungus is huge, mind-boggling huge. It is the Malheur National Forest in the state of Oregon. It was found because it was killing trees in this forest and when the DNA was taken from trees around 2.4 miles apart, it was found to have the same DNA. Overall it was calculated to be 3.7 square miles and the guesses at its age vary between 1,900 – 8650 years old.

They are some of the strangest living things that we have found so far on the planet. Bizarre is only part of it. They live all around us and sometimes even on us. They can work in harmony with the natural world or their mycelium can suffocate the life from its host. Those looking for a high, can try and source magic mushrooms, but where they choose to grow makes them less than appealing. They can be a wonderful source of food, from the ubiquitous button mushroom to the very hard to find, but exquisite truffle. They have even named one, the porcini, after me…

Aliya Whiteley is one of those with a fascination, or to be more honest, an obsession with all types of fungi. It began in her childhood trying to take pictures on her camera on the ones she found on Darkmoor that always ended up a little out of focus when the film came back from the chemist. These specimens though were just the visible part, to learn more about them she would have to delve much deeper. Looking through the guide books she found that some of the names given to them were quite wonderful, who would not want to find a fairy sparkler? Others names though have a much more sinister vibe, who can fail to have a chill run down their neck at the thought of a death cap.

All fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.” – Terry Pratchett

Whiteley has packed this book with hundreds of facts about fungi, you can learn which species ejects its spores at 20,000g, which mushrooms the mummy that emerged from the ide in the Alps was carrying, which species she found a carpet of yellow mushrooms in a woodland walk on the way home from a club and which fungi that have the names Toxic Ooze and Clint Yeastwood. I rather liked this. It is not supposed to be a rigorous study, rather, Whiteley’s writing is fun to read as you follow her looping connections of all things mushroomy. It doesn’t read like a science paper either, her attention to detail is a countered with a dry sense of fun and lots of anecdotes of her fungi forays.