Category: Review (Page 54 of 133)

3.5 out of 5 stars

“Here be dragons” is often thought to be on ancient maps, but whilst there were drawing of fantastical creatures on the cartography, this phrase wasn’t ever used. But stories of these creatures, as well as others that step over the line of folklore and reality have been a part of our culture for hundreds of years. In a village in Hertfordshire, a tomb was carved to cover the bones of one of these men who it was said was a giant, and who also slew a dragon that lived under ancient yew in a field called Great Pepsells.

Who was this man? Was he a real giant? Why is his tomb in the wall of the church? Was there ever a dragon? And could he find the field where the ancient yew tree was?

It is unlikely that you would have heard of the story of Piers Shonks, I hadn’t until I picked this book up a couple of weeks ago. To find the answers to these seemingly innocuous questions will take Hadley far away from St Mary, the 14th-century church of Brent Pelham, Hertfordshire where Shonks’ tomb is set in the north wall. He died in 1086, several hundred years before the church was even built so finding where he had been in the interim would be a challenge.

First, though he has to scour the old maps to find the location of the yew tree, the place where the so-called dragon’s lair was discovered under it when Master Lawrence was asked to fell it. These maps do not reveal their secrets easily, but there are pointers to other documents and pamphlets that were written in the Victorian age by the those that had an interest in the history of the place they lived.

Some of these are based on truth, some are based on oral histories that are passed from person to person, changing subtly in their retelling until someone writes them down. Others have their roots deep in pagan folklore that the church had tried to suppress but never fully eradicated. Finding out about the richly decorated lid of the tomb is another series of mysteries trying to discover who carved it, where the stone came from and how it ended up there.

Each thread of the story he is researching is scattered far and wild and fining the end of one thread often leads to another tale that is separate and yet still intrinsically connected to the main story of the book. Just finding out if Shonks was a real person is a challenge, but details gradually emerge about the real man as he chips away at the documentary evidence.

This is a deeply layered historical mystery. It feels like he is reconstructing a finely woven cloth from a collection of threads that have been scattered near and far from the tomb. Hadley has done a pretty good job of it too, but there are gaps as you’d expect. Deciding what is history and fact or myth and fiction is very hard in stories like this. It is like looking into a dark pool where the sky is reflected with your face, but in the murky water are tantalising glimpses of the things you are searching for. Even Wimborne Minster gets a mention with Anthony Ettricke, who is buried neither inside nor outside the church, but in the wall as Shonks is. I thought the book was fairly well written, it might not have the rigour of a book but an established historian, but neither does it have the dry prose that you can sometimes get with those as well. It has a good selection of pictures and maps which complement the text really well too.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Roy Dennis has been working in conservation since 1959. In his time he has been the RSPB senior office in Scotland, Chairman of the Bird Observatory and is now President of the Trust. He has extensive knowledge of seabirds, migration and Scottish island wildlife. He is a specialist in raptor conservation and has been involved in many re-introductions and research into these magnificent birds. He has been a passionate exponent for the reintroduction of mammals such as lynx and beaver back to Scotland.

He begins with cottongrass, that plant whose snow-white blooms sway softly in the wind and in the right light can glow in the fields. But they are an indicator of the health of the landscape, seeing them means that the deer are not overgrazing and a balance is being restored.  In these fifty-two essays, loosely split into the seasons, are on subjects as varied as storks and bearded vultures, downpours and stoats. There is a theme that runs all through them though, and that is his passion for rewilding and bringing back those complex interdependent links between predator and prey.

Dennis goes through all his emotions about the state of wildlife in Scotland in particular and the and the world in general in this well-written book. There is genuine anger in here about the state of conservation bodies in this country and the lack of urgency to try and reset the way of life that in the long run, will benefit us all. He has long been active in all sorts of programmes to help with this, for example playing a significant role in the osprey, red kite, golden eagle and sea eagle introduction programmes. He re-iterates several times that 50% of the planet needs to be returned to a natural state for them and us to stand a chance of survival. Essential reading for those with an interest in restoring our landscapes to some of their former glory.

5 out of 5 stars

As we reach the peak of one season in the northern hemisphere they are at the opposite end. It was in December in South Africa, their midsummer, that Tim Dee was watching the swallows as they gathered prior to heading north to Europe in time for another midsummer half a year later.

This seasonal migration of swallows and thousands of other species is one of the wonders of our planet. Spring moves at walking pace from south to north across the landscape and that equates to about 30 miles a day. This cycle has been going on for millennia and as much as we try to destroy the planet, it will still continue for the foreseeable future.

Part of Tim Dee’s reason for wanting to follow these birds is to remain permanently in spring and summer and avoid the bleakness of winter. Beginning at 34 degrees south at the Cape of Good Hope on the 21st December he is watching barn and greater swallows moving between his house and the ocean. He is normally used to seeing them in the spring and summer at home in the UK. It is an unsettling moment. Soon they would head north. Arriving in their own time and on time in Europe, they are following the rise in temperature as it reaches an average of 10 degrees, sometimes known as the isotherm line.

It is a very different feeling to being in the UK on the same day. It is the shortest day here and the light feels fleeting. Dee watches the sunrise in Swaffham and can almost feel the earth spin on his patch of chalky soil he is standing on. Every day from now on will be longer, every day will have those extra minutes of light as the planet pivots once again.

It is the beginning of a journey that will take him up and down the continent of Africa and up into the far north of Europe, where on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, he will see swallows in midsummer. He peers from the window of a plane, hoping to glimpse a redstart marvelling how such tiny birds can cross the vast Sahara Desert, staying in Chad, he sees the resident species mixed up with those flying through and it is always slightly surreal to see a common British bird like the whitethroat nearby some African lions. March finds him back in the UK heading from Bristol to the Fens and then on to Denmark where he sees a bog body in a museum and wonders about what past cultures would do to ensure the return on the spring. At Lake Langano in Ethiopia, he is waiting for the swallow to pass through and ends up watching his favourite redstarts in the meantime.

In April heading to Ireland to talk about writing and to visit the grave of the late great Seamus Heaney and to pas his respects to the poet. There is an account of a visit to Sicily to participate in counting the birds as they fly past. Sadly this is a place where there are under attack from the residents who see these migrants as a welcome addition to the pot. Romania in May is the place to see the wallcreeper whose ability to cling onto the sheer cliffs in almost a miracle. In June we find him in the far north in Lerwick and Aarhus as well as reaching the heady latitude of Troms at 70 degrees north and watch the people in the rush hour dodge the bull reindeer and walking out in the endless day.

As the summer solstice passes he recounts the time he was in Chad and awaking to a spasm in his arm. He thought that they would pass, but they didn’t so medical advice was sought and eventually a diagnosis was given. Telling Claire is a deeply emotional moment to read about. As he reaches the autumn of his life he becomes very aware of his mortality.

This is another magnificent book by Tim Dee. He is endlessly fascinated by all of the natural world, however, his passion and obsession is with birds. He has been fortunate to travel all over the world but he has a soft spot for those birds that head to our country each year. Even though it really doesn’t matter where he sees the natural world, it could be the vast African plains, a council dump looking for gulls or listening to the snap of a beak from the spotted flycatcher through his open window he is always ready to see things that other people miss. The writing is as ever, excellent, but in this book, in particular, is as much as about him as the writing has a poignancy and urgency behind it. There is a beautiful tribute to the artist who created the cover of this book (and Landfill), Greg Poole. Having the latitude of the places in the book was a nice touch too. If you haven’t read any of his other books, then I would urge you to do so, but save this one until last.

5 out of 5 stars

The invasion of Europe to fight back against the Nazi’s began in Sicily in July 1943. A couple of months after that the allies had reached halfway through Italy,  Norman Lewis was one of those who landed in Paestum, Southern Italy in September 1943. Just before he disembarked from the Duchess of Bedford they were given a lecture by the intelligence corps who could have saved everyone a lot of time by just saying that they knew nothing about what was happening…

Passing the corpses of those that had died earlier that were laid out neatly was an eyeopener for him. He and eleven others had been issued with a Webley pistol with five rounds of ammunition and no orders on what to do or where to go. Sleeping overnight in a wood he woke and heard German voices nearby, they soon faded out and he went back to sleep. The battle arrived with a vengeance the following day though, sitting in a farmhouse they watched a line of American tanks pass and not long after that they were back, but fewer of them and then lots of people running around wearing gas masks and running around panicking. The battel was to rage until the end of the month, and then Lewis was admitted to hospital with malaria. This was just the beginning of what was to be one of the most surreal experiences of his life and he was finally to set foot in Naples in early October.

As he recovered from his illness he watched the newly liberated population as they lived their life outdoors in the late autumn. They hadn’t advertised that they were the headquarters for the secret police, but word soon got out and they were to have a steady stream of people with information to offer. They had scant information rather they were there primarily to declare loyalty to the new regime. The information that they did gather sent them on various wild goose chases and they came to realise that a lot of the information being provided was personal vendettas and grudges being played out on an official level.

It is still a dangerous place, bombs have been left as booby traps, and in the chaos that happens as one authority changes to another, there is space for the rise of the organised crime to fill the gaps once again. The culture of silence was almost suffocating, he would hear about a murder, see where the body had fallen and there was nothing left but a few drops of blood and a denial of anything happening by those in the vicinity.

This shattered city that had pretty much been bombed back to the middle ages, people were starving, crime and corruption were endemic. If it wasn’t nailed down it would go missing. Whilst he did what he could given the meagre resources that they had, he tried to be fair and just in his work. He came to realise that his refusal to accept the token bribes offered by the population counted against him in the end. And yet with all this, it was fairly peaceful, his weapon would remain unfired throughout his stay.

I liked the diary form as you can follow the ebb and flow of people and life as it happens to him during his year in the city. He witnesses the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, deals with the menial, trying to find who had been cutting cables down or stealing army blankets to vetting whether a resident can marry a British soldier or not, a life-changing decision for some people. This is an excellent account of post-war Naples though at times it can be heartbreaking to read.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Neil Sentance now lives in West Dorset, but he grew up in the 1970s in Lincolnshire and it is to that landscape that he returns to his childhood to uncover a little more of his family history and to understand how the county that shaped who they were.

He grew up a few streets from the River Witham, as he describes it ‘a place of mossy banks and murky water’ and it where they lived out the stories and adventures in their heads. He has fond memories of wooden swords and pirate battles, rope swings in the long summer and seeing the crayfish at the bottom of the pools. The nearby football ground, where dreams of league success would be dashed every week, has inevitably become a supermarket. Just down from the river was Swallows Mill, a place for catching tiddlers, and now vibrates to the sound of the kick drum as a nightclub.

The memories go back further too, his dad reminisces about Bonfire Night, building up the fire from all sorts of kindling and windfall branches and the anticipation leading up to the moment when his grandfather would light it. Tradition meant that there would be a few fireworks and red hot potatoes from the fire before tipping the ashes into the river and heading home at midnight smelling of smoke.

Before the war his grandfather had shown some talent as a fast bowler, and could be useful with a bat; however, the dreams of going professional were dashed as his father needed the help on the 200-acre farm. It was to be his life’s work, every day’s labour was visible on his hands. Did he ever wonder what his other life might have been? He never said and no one will ever know.

Another generation back and the memories of the Great War are still raw as Charles Chalk thinks of his son in the graveyard of Pas-de-Calais. A young life wasted early in the war that would never make old bones. It brings him full circle as he watches his children running around near their new home, forming their touchstones in their own landscapes.

This is a wonderful series of short stories, vignettes and essays about family life in a Lincolnshire village. Not been to the county myself, but the descriptions that Sentance has of the place make it very appealing. The partial memories of his family are like shattered glass shards, a glimpse of a whole lived. It had echoes of Cider with Rosie, but with less of the rose-tinted elements, instead, it is written with a piercing gaze coupled with the tiny details that go to make up a life. All of this sparkling writing is what Bruce Chatwin calls the ‘substance of our ‘mental soil’ – to which forever after we are bound’. It is true too, I can still remember the stamping ground of my youth crossing the red stream over at a place called Sheets Heath as clear as something that happened last week. Very highly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

Our character and is made up from the things that have shaped our life; family, culture, friends, place, education and our sexuality all contribute to our multifaceted personality. These factors can be strained further when you do not fit within a conventional box in the society that you live in.

For Mary Jean Chan growing up in Hong Kong the strains of moving away from her deeply traditional culture and language and telling the world and her mother she was queer was a moment that wrenched their relationship in so many different ways. This collection written in and eight-part poetic sequence is her response.

The words Flèche and flesh are key to the themes running through this book. The first is a fencing term and is her offence against a world that often seeks to attack differences; the second term represents the vulnerabilities of being open to that world.

all the metaphors

Have failed the sea

Is infinitely breakable

My mother is raging

the way waves do

I thought that these were beautifully written poems that play with the poetic form on the page. What is very evident thought is her vulnerability as she stands against the tide of her culture, she resists the pressure to conform, she grows in inner strength. I was fortunate to have won this with the others on the Costa shortlist from 2019 and I must say that they have all been good so far.

Three Favourite Poems

Magnolias

At The Castro

beauty

4 out of 5 stars

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

I like puzzles of all sorts and Bellos seems to have these sorts of books off to a T. This is the third of his that is have read, though that probably is the wrong word for this type of book. The puzzles in here are pitched about right too, not too easy, but you don’t need a handful of PhD’s to be able to even understand the questions. It has a good selection of classic conundrums, infuriating brainteasers and baffling geometry puzzles that you can dip into as often or as little as you want. They often involve a linguistic or logical sleight of hand that makes you think of something entirely different before you realise that you have been sent down the wrong path to the solution.

I was quite pleased that I could get some (not many, mind you) of them straight away, and some took a little time to mull over. There were other puzzles that eluded me until I looked at the answers that are thankfully provided at the end of the book. Mathematically they are not hard, rather they are fiendishly difficult logical and sometimes illogical puzzles designed to stretch and exercise your brains. Good companion volumes to The Puzzle Ninja and Can You Solve my Problems?

4 out of 5 stars

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

Mankind has been far more reliant on trees that we would care to admit now days. They have been a source of food, shelter, warmth, tools and many other things besides. That relationship is under threat as we clear vast swathes of virgin rainforest, grub up ancient woodlands to build a train line that no one needs or cut the trees down in streets just because some official decides they can.

Hemery isn’t writing about any of those real-life events, though they do worry and concern him deeply, however, what he wants to do in this book is pushing the very limits of your imagination way beyond the boundaries of the copse. He has written twenty-five stories that will challenge everything you thought was possible about nature writing.

He has stories about a whole forest being taken overnight leaving only the leaf mould and some very confused police. He takes us into the mind of a bonsai that is half a millennium old that has seen things it can never tell anyone. There is a very short story of a politician passing legislation to make the UK a country without trees and the last moments that a son spends with his father. There is a story about a secret mission to collect seedlings. Scatter amongst these stories are flash fiction and poems.

Can we love a forest, yet fell a tree?
The forester sees beyond herself
Harvesting one, breathes life into more
More trees, more life, a future for you and me

I have read a fair number of books on trees and all things arboreal and one of my favourite places to walk is a woodland at pretty much any time of the year. I have read one other book by Hemery, Green Gold which was an enjoyable and fascinating book about the Victorian Plant Hunter John Jeffrey, hence why I was looking forward to this. Of all of the things that I was expecting though, a heady blend of dystopian science fiction combined with nature writing wasn’t one of them. I really enjoyed it, there are some excellent stories in here full of imagination with his ideas, but most importantly there is a warning in here about our neglect and complacency with regards to the natural world. As always with a collection, there was the odd one or two that I couldn’t completely gel with. There is something in here for everyone, he has mixed up stories with poetry and songs for a bit of variety.

Three Favourite Stories:
Memoirs of a Bonsai
DED Zone
The Man Who Harvested Trees

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

One of my favourite books when I was (much) younger was the Spy’s Guidebook that was published by Usborne. It was hardly subtle for those wanting to be a spy with its bright red cover, but it was in here that I first learnt about the discipline of codes and the stick scrambler. I want to be a spy when I grew up; inevitably I didn’t…

The need to pass on information to another person without it becoming public knowledge has been important over history, in fact, they can trace the first codes back to the Egyptians where the scribes would change the hieroglyphs to convey a different meaning to anyone reading them. The Romans were also known to use them and it is said that Caesar always used a cipher anything confidential. The Greeks used cryptography too, but they used the technique of steganography for getting messages to the desired recipient. The principle behind this is to disguise the fact that there even is a message, and one of the way that they did it was to tattoo the message onto the head of a slave, let their hair grow back and send them on their way. This, as you can imagine, had several disadvantages… The primary one being the speed of the message reaching its destination and secondly that they could only be used to do this once or possibly twice.

Being able to make and deliver coded messages was one thing, but being able to break them was another step up. The first explanation of cryptoanalysis was in the 9th century by the Arabic scholar Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Sabbah Al-Kindi. Where he mentions frequency analysis for the first time. The simple substitution and transposition ciphers which changed one letter for another didn’t take much effort to crack, but others, such as the were harder to do so, but these new tools meant that it became much easier to do.

It is this mathematical arms race between the latest code and cipher techniques and methods of cracking them that was one of the key factors in World War 2. The Nazis were using a machine called Enigma that could have up to 158 million million different ways of setting up the machine. The Germans thought that it was unbreakable. It wasn’t thanks to a trio of Polish mathematicians who constructed a device they called a cyclometer using parts from an enigma machine to generate all 100,00 permutations of the rotors. They succeeded. Then the Nazi’s changed the way they set up the rotors and so the Poles devised a machine called a bomba that could automatically search for the rotor settings. It worked for a time and the Nazi’s changed their methods again. The Poles passed their machines and knowledge onto the French and the English and they ended up at Bletchley Park. It was here that the mathematical and mechanical geniuses of Turning and Flowers set about building a mechanical computer that could rapidly check the letters over the 18,000 possible rotor combinations. They broke their first code on 20th January 1940 and ultimately changed the course of the war.

The American had their own cipher system, SIGABA, which was much better than Enigma, but was little use in the field as it could take hours to code and decode messages. A man called Philip Johnson had the bright idea of using native Navajo to send messages with coded words in their own language. Virtually no one outside of their community could speak this language and it was ideal for passing highly detailed messages onto units in combat quickly.

A lot of the techniques that were developed in the war were used after for encryption and breaking during the cold war, but it was the advent of the internet that modern encryption came of age. The last time that you used some form of encryption was moments ago when you looked at a website or bought something from it. The tools that are used at the moment are factorials of large prime numbers that keep your data and financial transactions safe are very sophisticated and can only be broken using huge super-computers, of which a number of intelligence agencies across the world handily own… The is a brief chapter on the wonders of quantum computers and the uncrackable codes that this technology promises.

This is a fascinating book full of clearly written explanations of the various codes and cipher that have been used over history. There is a little bit on modern encryption, bitcoins and so on, but not much on contemporary codes as ciphers, but that is to be expected. I thought that the page layouts were really clear with extensive use of colour photos and diagrams to go with the text. If there was one flaw, I did feel that the narrative was sometimes broken up by the explanatory sections. I would often read to the end of the chapter and then go back and read those parts after. It gives a good overview, but for more detail then The Code Book by Simon Singh is probably your next point of call.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Most people know that carbon is the element that can be found in all manner of products, from the humble pencil to the rare and expensive diamond. It is also found on a number of other items too, bike frames, tennis rackets and F1 cars where it has been used for many years. Whenever I think of carbon, I think of the phrase that Arthur C Clarke used to describe the human race: carbon-based bi-peds.

The element is crucial to life on this planet. Its ability to attract and connect to other elements makes it extremely versatile and it plays its part in biological mechanisms as diverse as photosynthesis and cell respiration, it could be considered the key element for life and death. Our very being is made up from 18% carbon, less than oxygen and more than hydrogen.

All carbon is formed in stars by elemental fusion and to take us through the story of carbon, Dag Olav Hessen begins with the makeup of the protons, neutrons and electrons and just how and why carbon is so versatile and readily forms bonds with other elements. So much so that there are currently 10 million different compounds recorded. From this, he takes us on the three unique structures that it can form, as he describes them, soft, hard and round. As carbon can for single, double and triple bonds it is and goes into some detail about the way it bonds to other elements and that its ideal structure is a ring.

Most people are aware of carbon these days with the role that it is playing in the growing climate change crisis and the second section of the book is full of the science behind this. One of the key scientists who started to measure CO2 in the 1950s was a man called Charles Keeling. One of the instruments that he made was first turned on in 1958 on the top of Mauna Loa and was only turned off in 2006. There is lots of detail on how the carbon cycle works and how many different cyclic events can amplify some of the effects. The final part of the book is about the almost certain catastrophic effects that we will have from the exponential growth in CO2 levels as well as some of the measures that some countries are taking to try and combat it. It makes for pretty grim reading

You would think that a book about a single element would be so interesting, but thankfully this one is. This is a clearly written (and translated) science book that thankfully did not read like a scientific paper or textbook as some of these can have the habit of doing. Worth reading overall I thought.

(The translator was Kerri Pierce)