Category: Review (Page 49 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.

It is thought that the last beaver in the UK died in the early 1500s. These large mammals were popular for their fur and for castoreum, a secretion of its scent gland. As we do with a lot of these large creatures, we hunted them to extinction. They were even technically a fish according to catholic decree so they could be eaten on a Friday. But if you go far enough back you will find people who revered them, the beaver can be traced in all manner of place names should you know where to look.

For me, it is common sense that an animal that once used to be here and was an integral part of our ecosystems should be re-introduced, but there are others who do not want to see them on rivers and wetlands. Anglers say that they will eat the fish and their dams will stop the migration of salmon and trout. Farmers claim that they are diseased and landowners want to see a pristine landscape devoid of life. It is all nonsense, of course, the ponds they create actually help the fish, they are very rarely diseased, and while they do change the landscape, helps all sorts of other wildlife and also helps us as their dams slow floodwaters down enough to stop the build-up of larger floods further downstream. It is for the better.

In Bringing Back the Beaver (No sniggering at the back), Gow tells of his often frustrating story is, at last, starting to pay dividends. He has been an advocate for wildlife and conservation ever since a trip to the Durrell foundation in Jersey. He has been responsible for increasing numbers of water voles, storks and as well as beavers is also helping with a scheme for wildcats. It has been a long struggle at times. Yes, he is a bit of a maverick, but I would much rather have people like him deciding our wildlife policy against some anonymous civil servant who wants to delay and defy these sorts of decisions.

One thing that you can say about Derek Gow is that he is livid about the obstacles placed in the way to stop the reintroduction of beavers, one of our native animals. He has been involved in many schemes that move from the feasibility stage to local consultation and before you know it, the vested interests of landowners and others work their magic in the clubs and bars and the scheme is kicked into touch.

It did make me laugh how one civil servant came and made all the usual noises about it couldn’t possibly happen and then accidentally left his briefcase there. If seemed foolish not to have a quick shufti at the contents and then he realises that they legally had no jurisdiction, it was all bluff. Something that would prove useful when Jeremy Paxton wanted to introduce beavers on his property. When challenged by DEFRA, he said that he knew that their legal team had advised that they had no authority to do what they were doing and they didn’t have a leg to stand on. The beavers stayed.

Gow is not a natural author, his writing is crisp, almost to the point of terseness, and matter of fact. He does not suffer fools, either. Thankfully there is humour in the prose too; the stories that he tells of his escapades trying to reintroduce these aquatic creatures are hilarious. The main reason behind writing this book is to reach a wider audience and to talk about the passion he has for these large rodents. He wants to see our land and riverscapes returned to the way they used to look when the beaver was a native of this country. We need more people like Derek Gow.

4 out of 5 stars

Prospect Cottage is a tiny place on the barren and windswept coastal headland of Dungeness. It is an unlikely place to want to live, mostly because of not one but two sodding great nuclear power stations. If it feels an unlikely place to live, then it is an even more unlikely place to create a garden. But that is just what Derek Jarman did.

He made that decision to create something beautiful on this headland in 1986 after he found out that he was HIV positive. At the time if you had HIV and the AIDS virus that it would almost certainly turn into there was nothing that doctors could do, apart from managing your symptoms. there was no cure and still isn’t but medicines are available to allow people to live with some dignity now.

He had bought the cottage on a whim having inherited some money from his father. This book is a diary of the time he spent working in this garden, battling against the elements to try to create something beautiful and finding the plants that could survive. He collected some of the driftwood and other objects that he found on the beaches to decorate the garden with. The gardeners’ Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd stumbled across it one summer and it became much better known.

His diary is also a nostalgic romp through his past life as a gay man. He was sent to public schools, places that had no humanity where older boys would torment the younger boys, mostly because they had had it happen to them and it was supposedly character building. There are details of his first experiences with other boys at school, fumbles in the grounds of the schools, that they would inevitably get caught at, and it would become another reason for the beatings. It didn’t stop him though. He remembers being presented with the bills for his education at Canford School, on the occasion of his 21st birthday; a hideously expensive school that is only a 10-minute walk from my home.

At the end of his life, he found love with HB, but his younger days had been a succession of encounters and lovers, often mentioned in detail in the diaries, as well as the trip he made to his studio flat in London and the 3 am walks out onto Hampstead Heath, and the police raids that he managed to avoid. There are lots of nostalgic entries about his life working in film and his support of the arts as well as moments spent in the garden alone and with visitors. The later part of the book is about his illness and time spent in hospital as TB in conjunction with the AIDS-ravaged his health.

He was to live another four years after the last entry in the book, before succumbing to his illness. I did like this book, the way he writes, you can sense his passion for the garden his friends and all the mini-projects that he has on the go. The later part of the book makes for fairly uncomfortable reading as he talks openly about his health and the opportunities that he may never get to take. Well worth reading for a very different view of life from my usual perspective.

3 out of 5 stars

One of my goals this year has been to read at least two poetry books each month and so far I have succeeded in this. I haven’t managed to get to read some of the older classic poetry books that I have been accumulating for a while now, but I have been reading some of the more contemporary offerings that have come my way.

I have read some of Penned in the Margins non-fiction book and really enjoyed them, but have not ventured into their poetry collections until now. I was fortunate to have won this collection through a Costa prize giveaway where I won all 20 books that were shortlisted for the 2019 prize.

                         The chalk path you bever longed for
zigzags through cowslips no one asked to throng.

Reckless Paper Birds is probably a collection that I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise and reading out of my comfort zone is a good thing. In this McCollough looks at all manner of things from the queer perspective. The subject that are as diverse as origami, stationary, pterodactyls stones and of course, birds.

The poems varied from short stanza to longer and more considered verses. Some of the subject matter was quite intimate and others wrote about the mundane. They all had a touch of the surreal about them too, the way he describes colour stones scattered on a road or being ina crowd falling from a tall building. I thought it was quite a good collection and challenged my outlook.

Three Favourite Poems
Nuthatch
Nervous Systems
Cartoons for Adults

4 out of 5 stars

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

Artificial Intelligence is almost upon us. Lots of people are using Siri on their phones or have an Alexa or Google home device to help them organise their busy lives. But as hand as these are, the next generation of AI is going to revolutionise the world in many different ways and cause us to ask many searching and profound questions about this technology in our lives. Will it be the end of humanity? Or can these technologies be used as a power for good?

It is thought that there are around 700 people working on AI in one form or another around the world and there are about another 70,000 software engineers who understand how it functions. The problem it this tiny subset of people who have in their hands something that has the possibility to dramatically affect up to 7 billion people around the world in good and bad ways. One of the issues that are affecting the development of AI is that there is almost no diversity of voices that are contributing to this technology. Black and Latino developers are conspicuous by their absence. For example, one conference had seven black attendees, only one of which was a woman. Therefore as it is developed by a very narrow clique, the majority who are white, male and have often attended one or two of the major universities, it is inherently very sexist, racist and biased

It is said that the first trillionaire in the world will be the person who makes AI a reality. Worryingly there are no global standards on AI systems, nor are there any moral guidelines to help structure some of the internal decision making. There are significant gaps between those building the technologies, those policing it and those who will be affected by it, It does seem to be more chasms than gaps though. AI automation will also lead to mass changes in employment at the lower level. This was beginning to happen before the COVID pandemic hit, extenuating the financial gulf between rich and poor is widening day by day.

One place that you will find AI starting to proliferate, is social media. It can be great, but it can be a next of vipers too, as well as an echo chamber and brings the worst out with tribalism and confirmation bias. Always remember, if you are not paying for a product or service then you are the product.

In amongst all the bad news though there are some positive effects of AI. It is being used to work on projects that promote sustainability and humanitarian use, drones can be used to deliver food and medicine to remote areas. Another scheme is using it to make incarceration more humane and allow better rehabilitation of prisoners. Another sphere that shows great promise in is healthcare. Doctors cannot know every single disease or illness out there, the ability of Ai to crunch data showed in a clinical trial that medical assistants using the tool were accurate 91% of the time, without having to use labs, medical imaging or even having sat exams. The software developed by IBM called Watson AI read 25 million medical papers in a week or so and could recommend treatments that it had found in obscure medical trials. There are even robots that have begun to communicate with each other in a language that we cannot understand.

The fundamental question that this book asks is, do we want AI to help us or become a monster? If we do this right then we gain a brilliant new partner, if we get it wrong it could be the advent of a new dark age and we all suffer. Is it just me that is thinking of the Matrix or Skynet? How will we as a global population react to AI and robots? If the paranoia about the new 5G mobile networks is anything to go by, it might not go that well.

Fiction is empathy technology (Steven Pinker)

Colman puts both sides of the argument for and against AI really well in this book. Whilst it has the potential to be a force for good, she is careful to detail the ways in that it could be an utter disaster. She explores all manner of subjects that are connected to AI, from the history behind it, the economy and even what is consciousness and can AI become conscious? It is written with clarity about a complicated subject. There is no moral machine without a moral human and the key behind getting a useful technology that works for all and not just a techno-rich elite, is empathy, that ability that humans have to feel what other people are feeling. Sadly it is an emotion that is sadly lacking in today’s world. It is essential to our survival to include it in AI. Highly recommended.

5 out of 5 stars

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

In World War 2 we mostly hear about the major wars and events that took place in Europe and the Far East. There was the Campaign in North African and lots of other little theatres of war that were taking place all over the world. Gerald Hanley spent his war in the desolate sun-scorched landscape of sub-Saharan Africa.

The population was the fierce and independently minded and fierce tribesmen of Somalia. They had been ruled by the Italians but after they had been defeated, the administration had imploded and his small group of soldiers were tasked with trying to hold everything together, stop warring tribes from raiding and killing each other.

To say it was tough there was an understatement. They were the last in a long line of supply drops and the men were rarely paid, had very little in the way of rations and the detachment of native soldier that he had under his command were in a constant state of near mutiny. Some of the men found it so tough there that suicide was the only option that felt they had to leave the place.

Yet it was the isolation more than anything which was hardest to bear, at first. Eventually one grew to love it, and those who knew long isolation in those Somali wastes and survived it, will miss it forever. It was the most valuable time of one’s life.

As tough as it was there, it was a place that Hanley grew to love. He learnt so many lessons from the people that he carried forward into his later life. He is humble but firm as they were not the easiest people to deal with, the way that he deals with a guy who has just stabbed someone else is eye-opening, but he did consider them the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest. I thought that this was an excellent book. He writes with a passion for the people that he is trying to help and manage there whilst trying to hold his detachment together. Whilst it was utterly different to Naples 44 by Norman Lewis it had a lot of similarities; both books were written by men who had been thrust into situations that they were never expecting. They both took everything that they came across in their stride and used the skills to strike an uneasy peace with the local populations. Very highly recommended.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

Nature as a whole is in decline. We are part of the natural world have taken it upon ourselves to make sure that we live in the most unsustainable and destructive way possible. The collapse of invertebrates has rippled all the way up the food chain as each species reaches their specific tipping point and are suddenly gone from our landscapes. In the UK there are almost no areas of the land that haven’t been touched or manipulated in some way by mankind.

Even though the decline has been happening for a long time, it is only in the past few decades that the dramatic drop in numbers of all species has become very evident. The act of strimming, weed killing and obliterating anything that looks slightly scruffy form our urban and rural landscapes has been the final death knell. The memory of the way that the landscape and natural world used to be, has almost faded from our collective memories.

But some people have had enough, there is a growing backlash against the vested interests and status quo; Benedict MacDonald is amongst that number. In this book Rebirding, he is looking at the ways that we can bring the life back into our skies in practical and profitable ways. There are various ways of doing this and reintroduction have been successful, in particular with kites and the great bustard. But more is needed urgently.

He looks at the various national parks that we have and the current state of the SSSIs and nature reserves and how they are doing. One of the criticisms that he has about them is that they are managing their particular area in a way that is detrimental to the long term health of the site. The key to bringing back wildlife of all shapes and sizes is to bring back the large mammals and predators to our landscapes and just let them get on with it.

One place that this has been happening is the Knepp Estate, primitive species of cows and horses and pigs have been allowed to wander pretty much anywhere in the estate and the changes that they have brought about have been staggering. The habitats have returned and with them has come species that haven’t been seen in years. The flip side of this is that their neighbours are not particularly happy about the untidiness of the estate. Another key behind this is the revert to a scruffy form of land control. Leave things on the margins, don’t cut verges back until later in the summer and wildlife will find the way.

I thought that this was a well researched and more importantly a well-written book about rewilding. Coming at the subject from a desire to see a sizable increase in the number of species in and around our landscapes is laudable, birds are his passion after all. One that every conservationist should read, along with Wilding by Isabella Tree and Rewilding by Paul Jepson & Cain Blythe, all books that have drawn similar conclusions from practical experiments that are being run in various places around the world.

4 out of 5 stars

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

People undertake a journey for all sorts of reasons, Helen Moat had always been restless, but when on the beach of Inner Farne, dodging the Arctic Terns, the thought of leaving her piles of marking behind and cycling across the continent of Europe to Istanbul struck her. She asked her 15-year old son, Jamie, if he would like to join her after he finished school and to her surprise, he agreed. Her other son just laughed and said that he’d eat his hat if they actually did it.

It was when she was on the ferry that the doubts swirled in her mind; would her bike be too heavy, would she be able to communicate with the people of the Balkans, could she keep cycling for three months and would her husband and other son still be talking to each other after she made it home? Getting off the ferry they discovered that they were in the wrong place to start the Rhine Cycle Route, but after Jamie had shuffled through the google map pages he had printed, they found the right route, and they were off. By mid-afternoon, they were on the outskirts of the Netherlands oldest city, Dordrecht.

It was a good place to start their trip, the flat landscape meant that they could build miles and stamina and the routine was different, the time she would normally be making a coffee and sinking into the sofa she was happily pedalling along a road exploring places that she hadn’t been to before. Moat could speak German so the next country, Germany, she was looking forward to. The route that they had chosen was alongside the Rhine and it was here that she wasn’t quick enough on the brakes and ran into the back of Jamie and fell off, cutting her finger and bruising her ego a little. Her bike was normally called Gertrude, but Jamie christened it The Tank, and it was to be called that for the remainder of the trip.

They are cycling through Europe in the spring and they continually hear birds signing as they pass through or define territories ready for mating. It reminds her of her father who loved watching birds. He was a difficult man and father, constrained by the draconian rule of a Brethren faith that put obedience over compassion. They lived in Northern Ireland which added to the stress as every day she would see soldiers with guns patrolling the streets and they were encouraged to hate their catholic neighbours. She was seen as a rebel as she got older which added extra strain to the relationship with him. This was a time to address her own internal demons as she pedalled along the river.

Northern Europe felt a comfortable place to travel through, but she was wary of Eastern Europe. She had heard lots of stories about the people and packs of dogs and other tales of warning. However curiosity could overcome fear, and they pushed on, suppressing the warnings to a nagging doubt at the back of her mind. Probably the hardest part for her was travelling through Serbia and Croatia. The population that always used to get along fine were split by politicians into factions that then spend a lot of time killing each other. It reminded her of her childhood growing up in Northern Island and the divide that was in every community as catholics and protestants grew further apart ad the hate increased. Conversations with a couple of people showed that the tensions are much reduced, but still there.

I thought that this was a reasonably well-written book about a relaxed and thoughtful journey across Europe on a bike. They are not setting themselves a punishing schedule or daily mileage, rather seeking to absorb some of the cultures and make it an enjoyable trip. There is the odd scary moment as they battle lorry on some of the larger roads and even have to take the train on the odd stretch. When Moat embarked on the ride, she was not sure that she would be able to make it, but it goes to prove that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. It would have been nice to see a few photos from their trip in the book and I don’t know if Patrick ever did eat his hat or not…

4 out of 5 stars

Life growing up with virtually nothing was what they were used to. Her father was not high in the communist regime, but he had some opportunities to travel outside the country with the family and when her mother saw the things that were available in the shops in the West she stood and looked in amazement at the shelves. All that was available in most of the shops in Sofia was queues. She grew up loving her homeland as much as she hated it and when they had the opportunity to leave when Kassobova was in her late teens, they took it. She moved to New Zealand with her family and then in 2005, moved back across the world to the UK.

This book is a series of memories of her childhood there and accounts of her returning there as a visitor. The town of Sofia had bleak apartment blocks to house the workers and their families, there were nicer parts of the town with older buildings and leafy parks, but they were reserved for those in power and with the right connections. One day having visited one of the nicer parts, she turns to her mother and asks her ‘Mum, why is everything so ugly?’ Her mother could answer her, just managing to hide her tears.

She recounts memories of the accident in Chernobyl, a painful year as she lost two grandparents and then the rumours started about a nuclear accident elsewhere in the Soviet Union. People who went out to celebrate the May Day parade were rained on with radioactive pollution and some were to die later from the poisoning. She was slightly afraid of her grandfather, he was an angry man and anyone who wasn’t of the bloodline would be an enemy. Her male cousin was the favourite, as he would carry the family name onto the next generation. In 1989 all of what they had known until that point would change as perestroika swept across the Soviet Block., both her parents would stare at the telly in disbelief as the events unfolded in front of them.

Returning to her homeland in the second part of the book is a mixed bag of emotions. Just looking at the map of Sofia she finds that strange new names of streets have replaced the strange old names. She visits her old school and when she explains to the security guard they used to study there, he waves them in. Some things don’t change though, the bus that she is just about to give up waiting for arrives late, and crawls slowly up the hills. Seeing family members that she hasn’t for so long is full of emotion she offers to pay for the fuel in her uncle’s car knowing that for him it is a quarter of his pension to pay for it. Bumping into school friends and catching up with the gossip is happy and sad at the same time.

Even though she no longer lives there, the ties to her homeland are still there but stretched gossamer thin. It is not your regular travel book where someone moves through a country or a region in a planned way, rather she spends as much time with her memories of the place as she does in the towns and cities seeing what is still there. As with her other books that I have read, she has a beautiful way of writing, it is as much about emotions and feelings as it is about the sense of place. If you have never read anything about Bulgaria before this is a good place to start.

3 out of 5 stars

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

Miss Finch and Miss Swallow, two cousins live in the village of Camborne in the West Country. They lived in a terrace of three houses and had the end ones with a neighbour in between. The middle house was currently vacant, the previous occupant a retired schoolmaster, Mr Herrick, had died suddenly of a heart attack three months ago. Various people had visited with the aim of moving in, but they disapproved of them, until the arrival of a gentleman in his mid-forties.

Two weeks later a removals van pulled up followed soon after by a small yellow car. A man wearing green trousers and a scarlet sweater jumped out and let the removals men in. He notices the two women watching him, and blows a kiss and holds his heart in admiration. He appeared at their door later with the gift of chocolates.

Mr Cadmus had arrived.

Cadmus swiftly moves from being an outsider to fully embedded in village life. The comfortable life and daily routine and they had enjoyed in Camborne disappeared as Mr Cadmus wreaked havoc on the day to day life of the village. There is an armed robbery, unheard of in this village and in Barnstaple one day there is an earthquake. Not everything is as it seems with Mr Cadmus though and the two ladies have their suspicions about him. Then the deaths began…

I have read several of Ackroyd’s non-fiction books, but up until now none of his fiction, so I was delighted to receive this. I thought it was quite captivating at first, the plot line was intriguing and he manages to frame the village as being a nice place to live on the surface, but if you scratch the surface there are lots of things going on. I felt that the characters of the two cousins were not fully formed, they both had a back story of mutual secrets that they had no desire to see revealed, but the arrival of Mr Cadmus adds another level of tension to their relationship. I liked this, it is full of surreal moments and dark humour. However, even though the first half of this was really good, but it lost me a little in the second part.

5 out of 5 stars

If you were to consider a trip from Geneva to the Khyber Pass these days you would need a lot of planning, visas and even if you were trying to do it on a budget, a reasonable wad of cash. Back in 1953 Nicolas Bouvier and his friend, the artist Thierry Vernet decided to do this very journey in a convertible Fiat Topolino. They had no idea how long it would take and they only had enough money for four months travelling.

This limited budget would come to define the trip and the rich experiences that they gained from it. Rather than charge across the landscape, glimpsing sights and the people as they drove past they were forced to go slowly, stop and take time to earn more for the next stage of the journey and move slowly on again. The lack of funds meant that they have to find the cheapest possible places to stay and eat, this brings them into regular contact with people that if they had been sightseeing on a bigger budget they would have missed completely. It gives them a much better insight into the character of a city

In some of the places that they stopped they were there for a considerable length of time, arriving in Tabriz they were quizzed by a police colonel who gained permission from the local general to stay as long as they like. With their passes stamped, they could rent rooms; they were to be in Tabriz for some time. The Armenians told them many bad things about the Turkish families at the other end of the village, so they thought they would pay the head a visit just to see if any of it was true. He was an interesting character who it turns out had lived in France for a few years and he filled them in about the history of the place. They made friends with the postmaster too, collecting the letters would involve a chat and several cups of tea, but he never lost one and it was a lifeline to the outside world.

You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.

They were to stay in the village for around six months before trying to leave. They had tried to leave earlier, but couldn’t make it through the water and were pulled behind a peasant and his horse, but they did eventually make it away and onto the next stage of their journey, through Mianeh and onto Tehran. The attempts at modernisation were a bit half-hearted and seemingly carried out without anything resembling a plan. But there were plane trees on some of the avenues that offered cool shade over cafes where you could spend the rest of your life. What really struck them was the blue that was used to colour everything. Its intensity in the sun lifted their hearts.

They left Tehran for Isfahan with heavy hearts and were driving along tarmacked roads that were pitted with potholes, making it a slightly perilous journey. They arrived at the place they were staying tired from the journey and weary from Tehran. They were their briefly and then onto the next town, Shiraz, but what they really wanted to do was leave Iran. They were asked to wait at the customs post until the superior officer arrived. The register was duly signed, and now they needed a push from the soldiers to get going again into Pakistan.

They reached Quetta and found a whitewashed hotel to stay in. They drank whisky on the roof terrace and listened to Mulberries drop onto the courtyard below. Just reaching here was enough. One rebuilt engine later and they were ready to move on to the final part of their journey.

After all, one travels in order for things to happen and change; otherwise, you might as well stay at home.

I had read Bouvier’s collection So it Goes, about his travels in the Aran Isles and Xian late last year but not read this even though I had had a copy for a while now. I now wish that I had read it earlier, as it is an absolutely superb travel book. Even though it was written a decade after they began their journey, it still feels of the moment. They take everything as it comes, rough and smooth, savouring the good experiences and taking the lessons from the failures and setbacks. The book is liberally scattered with the art and sketches from Vernet, they are full of energy and bring and extra dimension to the text. It is the sort of journey that I could imagine that Patrick Leigh Fermor would have continued with after his great trudge had he had the opportunity. Very highly recommended.