Category: Review (Page 87 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.

Standing looking over the rolling fields of part of the UK and it won’t be immediately obvious what bedrock the soils are sitting on. But the clues are there if you know where to look. Soil colour is one clue, but if you ignore the brick that most modern homes are built with now and find the older houses in your local area and you will find the stone that has been hauled out of the ground to build them. These buildings fit really well in the landscape, for example, the warm coloured  Cotswold houses, the cool greys of Portland limestone and the darker grey granites of Aberdeen show the bedrock off in all its glory.

This collection of essays from a wide variety of writers, poets and artists has been adapted from the BBC Radio Three series, Cornerstones. In here you will find Sue Clifford, one of Common Grounds founders, talking about limestone, Fiona Hamilton contemplating the brick, Paul Evans standing in a wood holding a horsetail that made up the coal beneath his feet 300 million years ago. Tim Dee writes about his own personal rock, a rock that nearly killed him and Linda Cracknell is entranced by the sparkle of quartz as people have been for millennia. Peter Randall-Page talks art and Dartmoor granite and Neil Ansell begins in Balcombe in West Sussex where they are starting to frack, before heading to Kimmeridge to see the same oil shales and see the unexpected sight of a metronomic nodding donkey.

The pebble opens the cosmos. And yet, lost in the immensity of understanding, should I not fear this thing

This is just a taste of these captivating essays in here from a great selection of authors and this is another cracker of a compilation from Little Toller, following on from Arboreal a couple of years ago. Even though it is all about rock, the contrasting subjects tackled from a wide variety of views ensure that there is always something to interest you in every essay. Before you venture out in your local area next time, find out what the bedrock is (check here) have a look around at the soils and see how your landscape is shaped. Highly recommended.

The Radio Three essays that inspired this book are still available to listen to here.

4 out of 5 stars

Whether it is a kestrel hovering over a verge or a Red Kite hanging in the thermals, a glimpse of a raptor is always a special moment. My closest encounter with a wild raptor was walking through my hometown of Wimborne one Sunday afternoon and seeing a Sparrow Hawk feasting on an unlucky pigeon a few metres in front of me. Managed to get very close just before it flew off. Thankfully raptors have a lot more protection nowadays but they are still subject to persecution in certain parts of the country.

However, there are some of these magnificent creatures that are very elusive; the goshawk is one of those and Conor Mark Jameson has made it his mission to try and find these beautiful birds wherever he can. His travels will take him from a stuffed one in a museum to the city of Berlin where Goshawks are thriving and back and forwards across the country in search of these birds and eventually to America where he seeks out the birds there and discusses the Native American beliefs about these and other raptors. Friends and other bird watchers keep him up to date with local sightings, though most seem to be sparrow hawks when the evidence is evaluated.

His obsession has been inspired by reading the classic book by TH White, The Goshawk. He wants to know more about the man who wrote the book and with a little bit of research, he finds the cottage where he used to live and some relatives who he eventually gets to meet. He considers the politics of birdwatching and wonders about how falconry and the persecution of them have affected their chances. The thing to remember though is even if

I really enjoyed this book, and particularly liked the way he has written it as a diary. His enthusiasm is infectious as he seeks these birds out. They take a lot of finding too, they are not naturally gregarious, preferring to live in copses and woodlands and rarely make themselves visible, so they may be there and you are not going to see them. Now I really want to read TH White’s book on the Goshawk.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Grief is something that almost everyone will experience to some degree or another in their lifetime after the loss of a parent, partner or another close relative. Each person has to deal with it in their own way; anger, sadness, tears, withdrawal and melancholy and it leaves a lasting effect on your psyche, something that you get past, but never over.

Until The Dark Interval dropped on my doormat last week I had never come across Rainer Maria Rilke, but according to the research that I have done since reading this he is a lyrical and intense poet who travelled through a number of European countries before settling in Switzerland. He was also an extensive writer of letters and the ones that comprise this short collection that he wrote to his friends and acquaintances to provide comfort and solace to them in their moments of need.

Death does not exceed our strength

They have been sifted from the vast collection of letters and translated for the first time into English by Ulrich Baer. In each letter, you hear his clear but sympathetic voice as he tries to bring the recipient back to a world away from the pain they are feeling and to use it to forge a new path back to life. There is genuine compassion in his words to all those that he writes to, and it is his words today that can still offer a much needed reassurance to those in their moments of need.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

People seem to be getting much, much ruder at the moment. Not only in what they say, but the things that they do, but some of this rudeness is the way that people say it and the outraged responses back from people who had never considered themselves rude.

It feels like a race to the race to the bottom at the moment.

All started with what Wallace calls the Hot Dog Incident though. His five-year-old son was hungry, as most small boys are, and they had spotted somewhere for lunch. Being asked to pay up front was a bit off and it was expensive for what is a simple food item, but needs must, and they took their seats. Twenty-five minutes later and there was nothing forthcoming, so he headed back to the counter to be fobbed off with some sort of an excuse and a promise of ten minutes more. After one hour still nothing so he headed back again to be given curt and what he considered frankly rude excuses, but still no food or a time when it would be available. It reached the point where they were arguing and he was rude back to her, something that he never thought he’d ever do.

To try and understand why, Danny Wallace starts talking (nicely) to all sorts of people who are looking at why society keeps getting worse, travels to the states to talk to scientists and psychologists, persuades a friend to join a Radical Honesty group with him and even confronts a guy in a pub who trolled him online once. He contemplates the effects of the ASBO, learns about the naked rambler, discusses cultural differences where one man’s wave would be considered quite rude elsewhere. He even goes as far as commissioning his own survey to gain further insight into how rude people are.

There are not as many laugh out loud moments in this book as there are in others, but this is an important and actually really serious book about the way that society is changing. Some of the blame can be firmly attributed to social media, where a certain amount on anonymity means that people can let rip with all sorts of threats and feel that it won’t come back to haunt them, yet… This is not a book for the answers though, those need to be addressed by society on a wider scale, and this is well worth reading about this worrying trend.

4 out of 5 stars

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

As a child, I spent a lot of time at Normans Bay in Sussex. The beach there was a mix of pebbles, shingles and sand when the tide was out. I swam, sailed, made sandcastles and I could not even begin to count the number of pebbles that I have picked up off a beach and thrown into the sea or scoured the shoreline looking for the flattest so I could skim them. Mostly they were just a there, I remember it was painful to walk across the mostly brown pebbles in bare feet to get to the sea. Every now and again I would find a shell or an unusually coloured stone which would be used on the sandcastles for decoration.

Until I picked this up it never even crossed my mind that you could learn so much from a single stone. There is a chapter on how a pebble is formed and a basic lesson on geology. There is another in depth on the kinds of pebbles that you are likely to find on which beaches around England. Ellis explains the meaning of terms swash and backwash, longshore drift and how shingle beaches behave with the relentless waves. He moves onto semi-precious stones and the types that you are likely to find around the UK.

It is a book that I wish I had first had as a child, something that Robert Macfarlane was fortunate to find on his grandparent’s shelf when he was growing up as he explains in the new foreword to the book. The language is a little dated, but then it is a reprint of a classic book that is over 65 years old now, however, it is still a delight to read. Given that you are dealing with small items of geology, the details of what to look for are not going to be changing for a long time. The fold out cover is beautifully illustrated by the artist Eleanor Crow and it is worth buying just for that alone.

5 out of 5 stars

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

For a lot of people landscape is something they travel through or past, barely acknowledging it in the maelstrom of modern life, unless it is something spectacular. Hathershelf Scout above the Yorkshire town of Mytholmroyd is one of those places that most would consider unremarkable. It lacks some of the photogenic qualities of the dales, has been a place where criminals and coin clippers hid in the 18th Century, has a drawn for those with suicidal thoughts was once a tip and hides a lethal secret. 

However, Benjamin Myers would disagree. Not only is it his home patch of landscape, but he can walk through tangled woods that lead up onto a crag that has its own stark beauty, its brooding gritstone seeping into his psyche as he uncovers the geological and personal histories of the place that run deep into the bedrock. Entwined with the landscape that he walks every day he can, he starts to discover that the remarkable exists in the mundane and ordinary, the imperceptible daily changes that slowly build to make the seasons feel like they have arrived in a rush.

His writing is split into the four elements that make up the view he can from his window, wood, water, earth and rock and he uses these to explore all manner of other subjects as he walks with his dog, Heathcliff. Nothing escapes his gaze or thought process, he considers the invasive species alongside the natural, acknowledges the life of the animals that cross his path as much as their deaths. History is as important to him as the modern political issues of the day. He swims regularly in the wild and shockingly cold waters in the local pools and plays a part in helping in the community with the floods in 2015 when Mytholmroyd partially disappeared beneath the brown waters of the River Calder after days of rain and watches as a landslide takes a sizable chunk of the hillside away. It doesn’t stop him exploring though as he snags his coat on the keep out sign as he climbs over the fence.

It is a difficult book to characterise as it encompasses so much within its pages. It is as much about the natural world and the landscape of that part of Yorkshire and Myers covers subjects as diverse as political discourse to folklore, industrial music to slugs, asbestos to ravens. Most of all it, this book is about place; that small part of our small country that he has grown to love since moving out of London. I have read two of his other books, Beastings and The Gallows Pole, just before I got to this one and I found his writing in those captivating. This is no different, his mastery of the language means that you feel you are alongside him as he looks out over the valley, or clambering up the same path behind him as the water runs down through the rock. I really liked the Field Notes at the end of each section, these are short and elemental poems as well as a small number of black and white photos that add so much to the rest of the book. If you have read Strange Labyrinth or 21st Century Yokel then this should be added to your reading list. Brilliant book and highly recommended.

4 out of 5 stars

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

In the beginning, there was the Namsara: the child of sky and spirit, who carried love and laughter wherever he went. But where there is light, there must be darkness—and so there was also the Iskari.

Asha, daughter of the king of Firgaard, has been brought up on the legends about dragons since she could first listen. But the stories of the Old Ways still have great power, they were responsible for her mother losing her life and even when she whispers them, they still have the power to draw dragons to the city causing murder and mayhem.

The child of blood and moonlight. The destroyer. The death-bringer; Iskari

If she could kill the ancient dragon Kozu, the Old Ways will no longer have the grip that they currently do. Every dragon she conquers she brings it’s head to her father, but Kozu is the prize that may release her from her betrothed, Jarek, a horrid man who almost has her in his grasp and keeps a secret over her and her family. Little by little she feels that she has become the Iskari. Dabbling in the Old Ways brings dangers that she won’t be able to control, but she knows she may have no other choice other than to release them.

This is Kristen Ciccarelli’s debut novel and apart from the odd minor flaws, it is pretty accomplished overall. It is fairly fast paced at times, only slowing at the points where the story needed it. She has written a good backstory to the book which gives it the depth that a fantasy needs and I liked the way that it is revealed slowly through the book as the Old Way stories, and unlike some flashbacks they didn’t really intrude into the story, just added a certain gravitas. Looking forward to the next book in the series.

4 out of 5 stars

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

What is Europe?

Is it straight bananas and red tape or a serious effort by a continent to see if the can actually make a collection of countries with some common aims but disparate views actually work together. The EU isn’t perfect by any manner, it has deep flaws that need addressing and is ripe for wholesale reform to correct. This part of the world had two major wars last century that was responsible for millions of deaths has to make it work. However, it does work, to a fashion, the amount of prosperity in the region is proof of that.

Anyone with any rational sense would see that Brexit is a really bad idea, but I can see why some people voted for it at the time. The feeling that we would get our sovereignty back and not be ruled by a bunch of anonymous autocrats, has a lot of appeals, but it was also a protest vote against the political establishment that had for years ignored all outside the Westminster bubble except when they need their votes.

This collection of essays and poems is a response to that vote. T the disparate voices of politicians, EU nationals, poets and even financiers tell us what they think of the result, what they think will happen, possible flaws and problems we will probably have as the changes begin to take effect. The most worrying trend is the rise of nationalism and fascism as the various interested parties push their agendas. The Leave party is now discredited with the ruling by the electoral commission that their campaign was illegal, but still, May pushes ahead egged on by the ultra-right elements of her fractured party. For a change a fundamental as this that potentially could take 50 years (yes 50) for us to ‘see the benefits’, there has to be something wrong with it.

Will this book make a difference though? I fear it won’t. This, though, is the voice of the 48% who didn’t want to leave, the people who care about the future of families, our culture and nation and still deserves to be heard over the shrill from the far-right.