Category: Review (Page 68 of 133)

4 out of 5 stars

If you were asked to name your own bodies largest organ you would almost certainly think of one of the ones inside like the liver or the heart, but it is actually the part of you that holds it all together, your skin. It is also an organ that most people think nothing of, day in and day out, but if you know what you are looking for you can see right into a person’s soul through their skin. Most doctors have an interest in all the bits inside, but Lyman is different, his fascination is the outside of us.

Unlike most other mammals we don’t have a significant amount of hair to protect us and keep us warm, rather what we have is a flexible and dynamic substance that can regulate temperature, is waterproof, resilient and is our frontline defence for all manner of nasty things. Flakes of skin are being shed continually, and it constantly regrows. It can be resistant to the sun, but too much exposure can lead to burning and even skin cancers. One of the amazing facts in here is just how sensitive the skin is. Every single square inch can relay back to the brain the fact that it has been touched.

There are some parts in here that are not for the squeamish, he begins with the story of a child who had a disease called harlequin ichthyosis, a horrid condition where the skin is dry cracked and scaly. He goes on to write about how we age and the inevitable wrinkles if moisturisers are any good and methods of keeping your skin in good condition. His skin safari provides details of all the countless bugs and microbes that we all carry, there are some really weird things that live in your belly button, as well of details of some really nasty things that occasionally appear.
I thought that this was a really good science book, he knows his subject thoroughly and has the skills to make the story of our skin very readable without becoming like a scientific paper. Well worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

Blending different cultures doesn’t always work it all begins to feel a little bland. Sometimes you need that juxtaposition between different origins, things don’t sit nicely together, that conflict between outlooks is often the most fruitful for ideas. So it is with this collection from Zaffar Kunial. He can draw on influences from Kashmir, where his father was born, and the Midlands where his mother is from as well as a subtle nuance that his wider family from Orkney have given him.

In this tilted
Storm-knocked world

This drop of earth
That holds the lift

It means that the poems traverse place effortlessly. One moment we join him on the sub-continent standing outside his father’s house, another moment next to a grave. The pace and length of the poems change for each one, adding interest and acting as a prism to his varied family backgrounds. I liked this a lot and I can really say why other than the multicultural elements work together well with his prose. I was fortunate to win this along with the others shortlisted for the Costa Poetry prize and I must say that the book itself is a thing of beauty, such simple layout for all the Faber poetry books with a cover that is so tactile.

Three Favourite poems
Rainglobe
Ys
Still

3.5 out of 5 stars

If you are fortunate to have a garden but don’t really pay it much attention, then you might not be aware of the insects and other wildlife that inhabit it at the moment. It is a jungle out there, but one that you need to get down on your hands and knees to see properly. Everything from the microbes, worms and ants in the soil, to the insects that pollinate and right up to the small mammals and birds that prey on all of these creatures lower down the food chain.

If you can tear your attention away from the screen and take a few moments to go out into the garden, then we need to understand what makes them tick and some of their lifecycle to help these creatures. For a lot of them, their lives are short, sharp and very often brutal. Oh and weird, very weird. Goulson ventures beneath the soil, into the compost heap and rootles around at the bottom of the pond to find out more about their lives and just how intertwined all layers of life are on this planet.

Insects are the bottom in a very long food chain, if they collapse in numbers then everything further up will suffer and the current evidence is suggesting that that collapse has already started. A garden that is sensitively planted can bring a huge number of insects in and will help all types of wildlife. Some insect-friendly’ plants that are available from garden centres but a crowd-funded PHD project found a cocktail of insecticides, in particular, neonicotinoids, fungicides and other pesticides on them. When Goulson raised this publicly, some organisation have made steps to do something about this, but other organisations who really should know better have maintained a worrying silence about this.

Didn’t feel that this was as good as his previous books, but it is still as well written with the occasional humorous moment. You also get a sense of his anger over the way that some things are continuing with the overwhelming evidence that drenching our land in chemicals, is doing far more harm than companies would have you believe. His greatest ire is for the insect friendly plants that are being marketed, his advice, don’t look for the label, look at the plants that have lots of insects gathering round them and buy those instead and don’t use chemicals on them when you do get them home. He has a strong message that we would be wise to heed. It is worth reading alongside The Bumble Bee Flies Anyway by Kate Bradbury and her account of changing a garden from a wildlife blackhole to a place full of life.

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 lot of things wrong with our political process at the moment, pedlars of lies and half-truths seem to have the upper hand, algorithms threaten our democracy as they target people of a particular political persuasion. Social media doesn’t always help either, it has become an echo chamber as people hear only what they want to hear and reinforce their prejudices. Money is pouring into these organisations and they are growing in influence. It feels like we are living a political version of groundhog day and 1984 as the tyranny grows.

In this short concise book on the three elements that make up a modern democracy, liberty, equality and accountability. After the wars in the 20th century, society grew well under the Keynesian economic policies but the Thatcher / Regan assault of the state has led us to where we are today. He explores the way that the neoliberal movement and overly powerful corporations have hollowed out our democracy and governments and how the systems is geared to deliver power and wealth for an exclusive and select band of people and misery for the rest.

What can we do though? He argues that accountability is the key. Past concentrations of power do (eventually) lead to change, as the population realises what is happening and that they have to effect change. People and organisations need to be held to account, and to do this we need a strong rule of law where no one is above it.

Bragg really nails exactly what is wrong with our country at the moment, and while he provides some of the answers to what to do, he doesn’t have all of the answers. Whilst that is a shame, but then I don’t think anyone has those answers at the moment. We do need a strong constitution though and we are lacking that at the moment. Worth reading, if a little short.

3 out of 5 stars

Moving to a new home in Brighton was a little bit daunting for Kate Bradbury, but it was the right time in her life to do it. The only problem was that space outside her back door was a barren and lifeless decked yard. The decking wasn’t in that great a condition either, so one day she decided that the whole lot had to come out and ventured out with her screwdriver.

Removing it took a little while and it revealed the stuff that had been left underneath that needed clearing, but in the end, it is gone and she has a blank canvas to create her own garden. As she wrestles the man-made elements away, her neighbours are in the process of covering their gardens with hard landscaping. Enriching the long covered soil means that she is finally able to put plants in that are going to attract insects and other wildlife. Bird boxes and feeders and bee hotels start to have the desired effect, turning a lifeless place into one that gives her pleasure every day.

This book proves what you can do if you don’t cover your outdoor spaces with decking or paving and think of your garden in wildlife terms and have the vision to change things for the better. Can you imagine what would happen if everyone did this? Wouldn’t solve all the problems that we have, but would go a little way to redressing the balance. Overall I thought it was an enjoyable book, Bradbury is a reasonable writer but what comes across in this is her enthusiasm for her six-legged friends who find her garden an oasis in the modern concrete jungle.

3 out of 5 stars

There are those that believe that star signs determine our fate, that very moment that you were born your destiny was set by the heavenly bodies. Others think that we are completely free to determine and set our path in the world. It looks like both of these are wrong, as according to the science free will doesn’t exist.

Our neuroscience probes deeper into our grey matter, it is revealing the processes that we use to make our decisions, how we form the reality that we see around us and just how much effect that the subconscious mind has over our day to day life. The DNA that we have inherited from our parents plays a key role too, certain character traits, such as phobias, addiction and depression are hardwired into us before we emerge from the womb. The unconscious mind has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve. Certain processes become automatic after a while, it plays as much of a part in selecting our partner as much as visual cues and personality do.

Critchlow has lots of example of human behaviour and why some things are easy for us to keep doing and why other changes need much more effort to have an effect. She has some good ideas in here and I thought that it was written well, but it didn’t quite have that extra something that would lift it to great.

3 out of 5 stars

If you want the strange then you need not venture between the covers of a science fiction book, there is a world that is equally unreal, where particles can be in two places at the same time, they are sometimes a wave and could be a particle, it all depends when you look. It exists in our world and universe, it is the quantum world, a place that has been baffling the brightest physics minds for a century or so.

At the moment there are six explanations of what could be happening in this surreal world. The names of them are as strange as the theories, there is the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Timeless Transactional Interpretation, The Not so Impossible Pilot Wave Interpretation, the Ensemble Non-Interpretation the Excess baggage Many Worlds Interpretation and my favourite titled one, the Incoherent Decoherence Interpretation.

This is a very strange and surreal world, even Einstein couldn’t really explain what was going on and called it spooky action at a distance. As soon as physicists think they have defined a set of rules that this crazy world conforms to, something is discovered that proves them wrong, but not fully wrong, just enough for a new set of theories to evolve, hence why we have these six concepts in this little book.

I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics – Richard Feynman

And can assure you that I am still one of them… In some ways, I feel enlightened by what I have read in here, in other ways I am still utterly baffled by some of the concepts that Gribbin explores. That said he writes about this incredibly complex subject and highlights the significant people who have been thinking about this for a long time. I liked the way that each of the interpretations is summed up in a single sentence with a wry humour.

4 out of 5 stars

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

When you think of the Cornish coast, images of sandy beaches being pounded with surf that has crossed the Atlantic spring to mind. Or secluded bays that have echoes of smugglers on the or dramatic cliffs still standing tall against the waves. Helford River on the east-facing coast of the Lizard peninsular is very different, strictly it is a tidal inlet, rather than a beach, but what lines it is ancient oak woodland, giving it an otherworldly feel.

The whole area was a much-loved spot for Oliver Rackham, and this book published after his death from his draft manuscript is his eulogy to the place. There are twenty-five woods in the area that have wonderful and evocative names, such as Merthen, Grambla, Tremayne and Bonallack. A lot of these are classified as ancient, but they all have a long history of human activity and use.

Each chapter concentrates on a particular element, for example, ecology, archaeology and a detailed look at each individual woodland with notes on the exact makeup with respect to the trees and vegetation growing there. He walked through all the woods seeking the coppice stools that reveal so much about the use and age of the wood, follows holloways from the fields down to the quays, finds the charcoal heaths that provided fuel for the tin industry and discovers the internal boundaries of the woods when they were under different ownership.

The book is full of images of the woodlands, from inside and along the shoreline where oaks that reach out from the shore and dip their boughs in the water. For the map addicts out there, it is packed with both recent and Victorian maps and details of places that have changed little since the Norman arrived. It is a fascinating book, full of two of my favourite things, sea and woodlands. The editorial team have done a great job of making the book from the draft manuscript by Rackham and is full of the detail that I’ve come to expect from him.

4 out of 5 stars

The closest some people get to nature now days is the motorway verge seen at 70 (ish) mph. Some people don’t even have that opportunity at home, with gardens becoming an outdoor space that the wilder aspects are banished from. It is not a recent problem though as back in the 1940s, Shropshire naturalist and photographer Frances Pitt also wrote a book called How to See Nature, that was aimed at helping evacuees who were encountering the countryside for the first time. Evans, who is the Guardian nature writer, was asked by the same publisher as Pitt, to write a modern version of the book to appeal to people who are as nature deficient as those eighty years ago.

The best place to start looking for the natural world is your back garden, or if you aren’t fortunate to have a garden a local park is a good place. Evans is here to accompany you on the journey back to connect back to nature. He will take us from our local area where you can see all manner of creatures at night if you take the time to look, right up to the wild moors via our hedges, verges and woodlands in the search on our national wildlife. A glimpse of a small mammal that could have been a pine marten, the reality was it was probably a polecat, but Evans had that glimmer of hope. Pine martens were supposed to be only living in the wilds of Scotland but were actually right under peoples noses in select spots in England and Wales.

The point of the book is to get you to reset the way that you look at the world, take the time to step away from the modern distractions and get outside. I liked the list of flora and fauna that you could find in most locations in the UK. It is not an exhaustive list, but enough variety to give you a range of things to see with a small amount of effort. He has similar goals to Simon Barnes in Rewild Yourself, which would be a good companion volume to read with this. Evans has a lovely way of writing, evocative with an eye for the detail in the bigger picture. It has a stunning cover by Harding (The Salt Path Cover) and artwork inside by Maria Nunzia, so will look good on your shelf too.

3 out of 5 stars

The hen harrier is a ground-nesting raptor that you can find in our upland landscapes such as Scotland,  Wales, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man. The males are grey in colour and the larger females, known as ringtails, are brown with a banded tail. There are sadly very few left birds left in the landscapes of England as this bird suffers tremendous persecution from gamekeepers on large estates where they keep grouse for shooting.

Beginning with a chapter on harriers from around the world and how to identify them, Watson moves on to the history of the bird in the UK with lots of detail on their life cycle from pairing up to the chicks fledging and where they migrate to. The second section of the book covers observations of harriers in the southern part of Scotland on moorland and the few that live in forests. These detailed studies on breeding, nesting, roosting and hunting were undertaken by Watson and other from the 1950s up until 1975.

The book was first published in 1977 and is the culmination of several peoples observations taken over a number of years. This distilled knowledge did get very detailed at times with precise notes on the observations undertaken replicated in here. However, as these were such a long time ago now, it does feel a bit out of date. He is not quite as lyrical as J A Baker, who to be frank, is in a class of his own, however, the narrative is very readable and his enthusiasm for the subject is evident.

I loved the little sketches of the birds he has drawn of the birds that they were observing. Even though the Hen Harrier is a protected species, the issue of them being illegally killed is still an issue, 42 years after this was first written. It is something that Mark Avery, who writes the forward in this edition, is extremely passionate about, so much so that he wrote a book on it, Inglorious, which is in my TBR pile and will be read soon. There are also lots of campaigns to get this practice stopped, and more details can be found here.