Category: Review (Page 85 of 133)

5 out of 5 stars

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

With their slightly naff arcades and a stiff enough wind to blow sand in your ice cream, there is some unique and nostalgic about the British seaside. The cry of the herring gull is one of the distinct sounds that make the trip to the coast; for some, it is a special sound, others, however, detest these bold avians. However, their reputation is not great though, they are known as bin chickens and frequently called something ruder especially after they have just purloined your chips. In this modern world, there are a lot of creatures suffering at the hand of man, but some survive and others thrive. Gulls are one of those that are making the most of the way we are now using our landscape.

Where gulls win though is our wastefulness these days, we throw so much rubbish away as well as littering the cities and countryside that they have become intertwined and dependent on us. As we are not allowed to incinerate rubbish these days, the items that we cannot recycle have to go into landfill. On every waste site around the country, you will see gulls in their hundreds, sifting through the plastic searching for titbits to eat. The generic, and incorrect term, seagull covers all of these large white birds. But if you take time to stop and look at them you will start the see the difference between the various species that live in the UK. Until recently it is only with the science of DNA testing that now that we are seeing the subtle difference between very similar looking gulls and that are many more subspecies than was first thought.

A ghost gull – the colour of dirty ice or wood ashes. It was like an ice-light or snow lantern on the shore.

Tim Dee has been a bird watcher since his teens, where he would try and look at almost anything with feathers, but he is becoming a “larophiles” or gull enthusiast as they pique his curiosity now. He heads to Essex to one of the main landfill sights for London to help catch and ring them and realises just how large they are when handling them. He travels backwards and forwards across the country seeking them, as well as heading to South Africa and then Madagascar to see their gulls. It is wide-ranging too, he finds gulls in books, those that have made it to the big screen as well as those that have had their fifteen minutes of infamy in the news. Mostly though this is a eulogy to a bird that most would not even consider worth watching, birds that he can see every day when he closes his front door in his home city of Bristol, birds that are intrinsically linked to us. Thought that this was another brilliant read from Tim Dee and after reading this I am never going to look at gull in the same way. Very highly recommended; if you haven’t read his other books, then I would urge you to do so.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Scotland has a rich and varied history, that if you know where to look, is very visible. Until recently most people there walked everywhere and the paths that they trod are still visible in the landscape if you know where to look. Alistair Moffat is one of those who has been looking for these historical routes in maps and books and most importantly on the ground.

His research has given us this book of ten walks scattered around Scotland each with a particular theme or historical event. Beginning with the path from Loch Tay to the Firth of Tay, called the River Road, Moffat walks and talks us through the history, culture and landscape as he walks the paths. From there he takes us along the Herring Road, the Rail Road, the Road to Ruin and the Road to Heaven.

I really liked the nice hand-drawn maps at the beginning of each of the ten journeys and this is a really enjoyable book about walking historical footpaths. He undertook all of them over the course of a year, in all weathers, with his maps and ever-present cheese sandwiches. More importantly, this is the beginning of a project, provided funding can be sourced, to find more of these routes and to make them safe for more people to walk along with proper signage and so on, with the hope of having public art and apps that tell the history as you follow in the footsteps of others from times past. I hope that the project gets the necessary funding they need for this.

4 out of 5 stars

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

For those of you who have not come across Tom Gauld before, you are in for a treat with this collection of literary-themed postcard set. In here are 50 of some of his funniest bookish cartoons written with his very distinctive artworks and deadpan humour. To give you a flavour of the quality of his work, have a look at his website and

https://www.tomgauld.com/portfolio/

https://www.instagram.com/tomgauld/

I do have a couple of favourites in here, one of which is a guy looking for his kindle, the other is how a book lover packs for their holiday.

I have been a fan of Tom Gauld for a while now, cutting out his cartoons from the Guardian Reviews and keeping them so to have some of the best in one collection is great. There is only one problem with this though; it is a book that you will need to buy two of. One to keep and one to send the fantastic postcards from to other book-loving friends. I won’t be passing any from this copy on, but some may be getting it as presents.

4 out of 5 stars

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

2013 dawns and Guy Stagg has decided that he wants his life to take a different direction. Having suffered for years from mental illness culminating in a nervous breakdown, he is desperate for a way to get better. He had decided to walk the 3,400 miles from Canterbury to Jerusalem as a pilgrim and an unbeliever, hoping that the ritual of walking will heal his mind. He would walk at the pace that suited him, following the ancient pilgrimage paths and relying on the generosity of strangers to give him shelter and nourishment.

Leaving the UK at that time of year meant that when he got to the Alp he was going to be walking over the mountains in the winter. This was the first of his many physical and mental challenges that he faced on his walk, some days were easier than others and he was lifted by the assistance that he got from people that he had never met and was likely to never see again after he walked on in the morning. As well as private homes, many of the places that he stays are monasteries and convents. They provide conversation and food and he slowly gains an insight as to why some have chosen to step back from society and follow a different agenda. Meeting these different people with their own slightly different interpretation of the Christian faith gives him insight into the way that modern religion works compared to the saints, missionaries and martyrs of times past. Across Europe, people are slowly losing their faith, but oddly pilgrimages are becoming more popular, for a whole raft of reasons for those that undertake them.

Staggs main aim of his pilgrimage was to overcome his own personal mental health issues. It is a tough walk back from the darkest points of his life so far. There is a rawness to the writing, understandable, given what he has been through and continues to suffer from, as he walks. But it is also a contemplative and meditative walk across Europe to the Middle East discovering that humanity does still exist in these troubled times.

4 out of 5 stars

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

Scotland is famous for its breath-taking scenery, the fertile lowlands, rolling hills and the much climbed Munroe’s. It has been extensively written about and photographed so finding another route and a narrative that flows from this landscape cannot be easy. Chris Townsend takes an idea that he got from Ribbon Of Wildness by Peter Wright. He wants to walk the spine of his adopted land from the border at Deadland Fell right up to Duncansby Head on the North coast.

 A watershed, a divide, between two worlds.

This backbone of the country that follows the line of hills that the water drops away either to the Atlantic or the North Sea is about 700 miles long. It is a tough walk too, crossing moorlands, bogs through forests and or course over the top of mountains at an average height of 450m. At certain points of the route, the line between the two directions of travel that the water goes can be less than 50m or be vast distances apart in the flatter parts of the country.

 A  trickle begins, running gently downhill, eventually to reach the ocean

This is the first of Townsend’s books that I have read and it is not going to be the last. This thoroughly enjoyable travel book about him walking through Scotland is written at the same gentle pace that he walked at. For him, the adventure is the journey, not the finish and over his route, he has some adventures, gets soaked several times, avoids being blown off a hill, watches the sunset on a perfect evening from his tarp. He has quite a philosophical outlook, reminisces about past walks and contemplates both the independence referendum in Scotland and rues the Brexit vote. We learn about the places that he passes, touching on the history and the wildlife that he sees, but not in an overbearing way. It also has some of the best maps that I have seen in a travel book, the route is clear and unambiguous as it wiggles it’sits across the landscape.

3 out of 5 stars

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

Almost Llewhellin has had an unusual upbringing on the coast of Wales,  being brought up by his sister Perfection. He travels all over the coast and local area, playing in the graveyards, exploring the sea caves and he is intrinsically linked to the landscape where he lives. Rather than other children to play with he knows mermaids and mermen, morticians and his own family’s undead. It feels to him like time has stopped, he is stood watching things as they drift on by. Even moving away has no effect, Pembrokeshire has its roots deep inside his soul and he returns once again.

I dreamed of pearls, full fathom five;

I sang of gales, the tang of salt

Almost as a character feels like he is not fully of this world, but rather he inhabits somewhere in between this world and the next as he mixes with mermaids and converses with the dead. This is a strange book in lots of ways, very surreal at times, blended with fantasy, a dash of folklore with hints of The Graveyard Book. It is a lyrical book and I really enjoyed the poetic elements, but personally struggled to engage with the characters at times.

3 out of 5 stars

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

“The Guide says there is an art to flying”, said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” ― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

For millennia man wished he could fly like the birds, people had been up in hot air balloons since 1783, but it wasn’t until 1904 with the first powered flight from the Wright Brothers that we saw the dawn of a new era. These early pioneers of the air began to fly around America, Charles Lindbergh became the first to fly from America to Paris in his epic flight and flight changed the way we connected with others around the world. But people still wanted to reach for the stars.

It would take a World War for humanity to develop the technology that would make this possible though and it was the losing side that gave the rest of the world the rockets that would enable men to finally leave the grip of gravity for the first time. That brilliant scientist was Wernher Von Braun, a former Nazi, who spent the billions of dollars that the US government wanted to spend in the Cold War space race. This space race put men in orbit, gave us technologies that we are using today and 65 years later after the first powered flight, put the first men on the moon.

Two pictures from the Apollo missions Earthrise, taken during the first manned mission, and The Blue Marble, taken in the final one, became some of the most reproduced and influential photos of all time. It became the image that inspired the environmental movements around the world as people realised that this small blue planet was our home and that getting more than half a dozen people off at any one time was near impossible. We only have this planet. If we bugger it up, who knows what could happen

This is an enjoyable book on the rise of man to overcome gravity, rise from the surface of the earth and achieve the monumental task to stand on the surface of our nearest satellite. Good overview of the history of flight and the links that those first pilots had to the rocket men.

4 out of 5 stars

In rural Suffolk in the 1930’s the effects of the Great War still loomed over those working the land. There was some change in the air though, modernisation was slowly happening despite the global Great Depression. For everything that was moving on, there was as much standing still too. At Wych Farm, they farm the land in the old way and everyone, including the fourteen-year-old Edie Mather, is still expected to help with the harvest.

In these uncertain times the appearance of Constance FitzAllen from the heady heights of the capital looking for stories in the rural economy and hoping to capture the old ways before they disappear for good. For all her glamour, FitzAllen brings with her ideas that seem quite innocent at first, yet have deeply sinister and radical roots.  As Edie finishes school and has to decide what she does next, the appeal of heading to London grows on her and she hopes that it will take her away from the unwanted attention she is getting from a lad from a nearby farm. Things are coming to a head as FitzAllen starts to push her agenda to the villagers in the pub one night.

As with her previous books, the natural world is the very bedrock of this story, but this time she has woven in the hardship of farming the 1930’s as well as the alarming rise of nationalism in the UK that had certain parallels to Germany. Draped over all of this is the story of Edie as she reaches a crossroads in her life, unsure of what to do, wanting to not be the baby of the family anymore, but fearful of the future. There is something about Harrison’s novels that resonate with me and in All Among the Barley, her writing is lyrical and eloquent without feeling rose-tinted and sentimental; there is proper drama within these pages. It feels authentic too, the research that Harrison must have undertaken to get the details right for the season, the region and the language spoken at the time. It evokes standing in that field feeling the late summer breeze brushing the barley. There are beautiful maps by Neil Gower too! I can highly recommend this book from Melissa Harrison, her stature with words increases with every book she writes. It is timely too as it feels that history is repeating itself at the moment.

3 out of 5 stars

London is an amazing city, it feels very organic with streets that ebb and flow rather than being in a tedious grid pattern. It mixes the very old, The Tower is over 950 years old, with the sharpest new architecture. Unless you are fortunate to live or work in the newest skyscrapers, you will rarely see the layout from above.

Nightscape is one of those who prefers to discover the delights of looking down over the city for himself and has become a  YouTube sensation for his videos of him and his friendsYouTubeing on the roofs of some of the highest buildings in the capital.

It is illegal and he has had several run-inss with the authorities, been arrested, had all his electronics siezed and he still does it. The prose is not why you’d get this book, but what you do get is some amazing pictures of the skyline of London with Nightscape and friends standing quite relaxed over some death-defying drops. She has been invited to other cities where the authorities were more than happy to assist him in hitting the city heights. One for the pictures, though if you like this can also recommend Bradley L. Garrett’s books Subterranean London and Explore Everything.

Another nice touch was when you tilted the pages: