Category: Review (Page 9 of 130)

5 out of 5 stars

I can’t remember quite how I first came across Roger Deakin, but according to my records, I first read Waterlog in 2008, a few years after it was published. I was astonished by how good a book it was. The guy could write. I did a little research to see what else he had written and it was then I discovered that he had died two years before.

However, there was another book that he had written and that would be out soon. There was news of another being brought together from his notes by his literary executor, Robert Macfarlane.

But who was this man who managed to conjure these wonderful books from the same letters and words we have? There was very little about him from what I could find.

Thankfully, that has been resolved with the new book that Patrick Barkham has pulled together from his archive and with the help of numerous other people. It is mostly in his own words too with lots of contributions from those that knew him at the different stages of his life.

It is a fascinating account of a man who could be warm and generous as well as reckless and demanding and difficult at the same time. As brilliant as he was, there were lots of flaws in his character. The other contributors to this life story are honest in their portrayal of Deakin. I thought it was quite refreshing to read some of these, as often biographies can sometimes be far too rose-tinted for my liking.

I you have read, Waterlog, Wildwood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, then I can highly recommend this, along with Life at Walnut Tree Farm.

5 out of 5 stars

Natasha Carthew is Cornish born and bred. Her family have a long history in the county too and were responsible for building most of the village that she was born and grew up in. She no longer lives there for a number of reasons the most significant is that she is not in a financial position to be able to afford a property there. There are villages now where no locals live, they are all owned by rich people with second homes or people who let them to the influx of summer visitors.

She had everything going against her growing up, poor female and also gay, she was one of the disposed people in the poorest county in the UK. They lived off her mum’s income, as her dad considered anything that he earnt to just be for him. He wasn’t around much either, having ducked responsibilities he was a womaniser and always had a girlfriend or two, one of whom moved into the flat above them with him at one point!

Her mum was resourceful and resilient though, always ensuring that Carthew and her sister were fed and looked after. They managed to move into the village to a slightly larger home, which helped a little. School was a struggle, mostly because she couldn’t see the point, but the chance finding of a leaflet with a course that really appealed to give her a path out of the vicious poverty circle she found herself in.

She went to the very edge of the abyss several times and the thing that kept her here then is the same thing that keeps her sane now and that is her writing

This is not an easy book to read by any means, it is an emotionally charged book full of raw prose and revelations of her upbringing. The is as much a personal memoir as it is a critique of the way that the Cornish have been abandoned by the UK government. High property prices because of the influx of second homeowners combined with low seasonal wages mean that most people born in Cornwall cannot afford to live there now. Whilst Carthew has come to terms with not being able to live in the place she chooses, many in the county are being forced out. It would be nice to think that those in power would read a book like this, but I somehow doubt they will. If you have read Lowborn by Kerry Hudson then this should be on your reading list too.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

My first child was born over 22 years ago now. It was a fairly straightforward birth, but she wasn’t the easiest baby. Now she is a confident young woman who knows her mind. The thought of losing her just before she made an appearance is something that I really don’t know how I would cope with.

It happens though and one of those people that this tragedy happened to is William Henry Searle and his partner Amy. Their daughter was due around the end of July and until a few days before, everything seemed to be well with both mother and child. He wakes to find Amy holding her swollen tummy saying that she can’t feel any movement. She is pale and beginning to panic. They make the journey to Southampton Hospital rather quickly and after various medical examinations discover that their daughter has died in the womb.

Elowen would never know her parents and they would never know her.

To say this is a moving book is an understatement. He is angry and wants to know why it happened. Was it something that they did? Was there another problem that the scans and checks they do these days never picked up? He explores these and other questions as well as taking us through some of his own personal dark moments of grief.

He goes through the five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They do not happen one after another, instead, it is mixed in a swirl of emotions and other feelings. He is very open about his feelings about the loss of Elowen and the raw and heart-rending prose cut right through to me. It reminded me of this, where the grief never fades, rather it becomes part of your character.

I would be lying if I said this was a great book to read; it is and it also isn’t. Seeing the emotional strain of a couple who have lost a child is not going to be for the faint-hearted. This is a book written from the heart of a man who wanted to be a father and is mourning all that he lost. It is an important book though, to show that even though the process of grieving can be long, the energy can be found to be able to do other things in time.

5 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Trees are hugely important for our global ecosystem, just how important though, we really don’t know fully. Research is always uncovering the ways that they work and the methods that they communicate amongst each other. They are some of the oldest living organisms on the planet too, with some individual trees reaching 4,00 years old and it is thought that some groups are many times older than that.

The book is split into nine sections such as Seeds, Soil, Saplings, Flowers & Fruits and Tree Time which have over sixty essays by authors such as Jessica J. Lee, Suzanne Simard, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Robert Macfarlane. There are even the lyrics from a song that Holten has applied her wonderful tree font to. The essays are varied and interesting though, as with any collection, I did have some favourites.

This is one of the most beautiful books I have read this year. The fine gold detail on the cover is exquisite. But couple that with the pale cream pages and the rich green ink used throughout, the whole thing is a work of art. Holten’s Tree Alphabet used to highlight the writing she has drawn from numerous sources is the icing on the cake. She uses this for the titles of the essays and to introduce each section. What I did like was the ways that some of the short essays have been entirely recreated in this wonderful font, the pages move from small copses and sometimes dense woodland.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Lewen Weldon was in Marseilles en-route home for his biannual leave. For the previous fourteen years, he had been mapping the deserts of Egypt. But the UK has just declared war on Germany and started what would become First World War.

He had a particular set of skills, including being a fluent Arabic speaker, that the intelligence services knew they could use and they had a very important role for him. He was to run a network of spies behind the Turkish lines dropping them by boat and interviewing locals who were sympathetic to the allies and their strategic aims.

The book was written from his diary of the time and it is almost like reading a report with embellishments. But it is those additions that bring it to life as a book. There are details about the mundane parts of the job and the terror of being bombed whilst in the harbour and torpedoed.

How the book came back into publication too has an interesting back story.  I am glad it has been brought back as I thought that it was a fascinating book. Weldon gives a great insight into the job of running agents in enemy territory. It is written in a clipped mater of fact style which is very detailed about who he met with and where, but he also manages to convey just how tense it was in the area when they were carrying out these operations, in particular at night. Well worth reading.

4 out of 5 stars

I had never heard of this Roman Road before coming across this book, but it runs from the south of Wales and crosses the Breckons to Y Gaer before reaching Llandudno in the north and then crossing to Anglesey, the place where the Romans crushed the druids.

He wants to walk this ancient route, and it is something that he has been wanting to do for a decade or so. It is a walk undertaken in stages, partly because of the pandemic and the time he had available during the lockdowns and various other restrictions that were in force then.

It is a triple view of Wales, he is very much in the present when walking up hills and along the 2000-year-old road, parts of which are still visible. But inevitably he explores the past of the landscapes and the people that inhabited the villages that he walks through. The third aspect of the book is the future of the country as the spectre of climate change looms ever nearer.

I thought this mix of travel, nature and environmental writing was really good. Bullough gets the balance between each element right.

It is a walk up through the country, but also back in time and with the interviews with leading environmentalists, a look to the bleak future that faces us all. Even though those passages could be grim reading at times, the rest of it is quite soothing. I liked that he wasn’t blending the different stages of the walk into one narrative. To me it didn’t feel disjointed, rather it came across as him having the tenacity to keep going regards. Each chapter has one of the amazing paintings by the artist Jackie Morris and they are as beautiful as any of her work that I have seen elsewhere.

4.5 out of 5 stars

When people think of rainforests the Amazon is the place that immediately comes to mind, it does for me. But did you know that this country is also a rainforest nation? We are, and we have what is called temperate rainforests, these exist in the latitude bands between the tropics and the poles.

I have known about this for a little while now, but one person who discovered this for himself was Guy Shrubsole. After moving to Devon, he came across this spectacular habitat for the first time. And then having discovered it, he realised just how little of it was left across the country. This book is his story of the discovery of these unique places. Utilising the power of modern mapping systems he realised that at its peak, temperate rainforests would have covered around 20% of the UK.

Now there are only fragments left.

He launched this on Twitter and with the assistance of people all over the UK he has collated a map of all the places that still have this left. He travels around to some of them left, like the spectacular Wistman’s Wood and outlines what we can do to protect them.

I thought this book was excellent. Not only is Shrubsole is an excellent writer and his passion for this subject in particular, comes through on every page. Not only is he bringing this to our attention in this book, but he is actively involved in practical solutions to increase the coverage of these forests on the western seaboard of our country. Highly recommended.

Follow them on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/LostRainforests

4.5 out of 5 stars

Travelling and going on holiday to another country is a great way to experience what that place is like. You bring home the memories and a dodgy bottle of something that sits at the back of the drink cupboard. To really experience a place though, you have to move there. Trevor Dolby was one of those who had taken the plunge.

They had been looking for a while spending weekends looking at various properties, but finding nothing suitable until they found this property in the village of Causses-et-Veyran almost by chance. There is the inevitable story of moving in and him and a friend trying to move furniture that four people could barely lift.

The book is full of his little stories of living there, learning how to navigate their way around the French bureaucracy, finding the best baker and knowing who is the best builder to use. They discover the delights of the vide-greniers, and learn just how much rain a storm can unleash on the village in the summer. He swims in the local rivers with a capybara, indulges in the local wines, has lots of lunches and starts to become a full member of the village when he is part of the protests against the Post Office.

I really enjoyed this. It felt to me like he was evoking A Year In Provence by Peter Mayle, the book that got me into travel writing when I first read it many many years ago. (I really must reread it one day). It had a similar vibe in the way that he writes about the place he has settled and the people who live there too. There are pastiches of that book and caricatures of the people around him as well as the inevitable stories of renovating a really old building in another country. There are also parts of his past life as a publisher and a poignant tribute to his son.

4 out of 5 stars

Woodville has more or less returned to normal after the Crow Folk were banished from the village, war has arrived too, with planes being seen overhead on a daily basis. It is brought very much to home when one crashes into the local garage.

Fay arrives there just in time to realise that there is a car stuck with people inside. She rescues the young lad and three children from the burning garage. They are Jewish emigrants from Germany who got out just as the Nazis clamped down and are on their way to the local manor house where they have been offered accommodation by Lord and Lady Aston.

But this is not a typical village and as she comforts them she has a vision of the eldest that chills her to the bone. Magic can be felt in the air once again by Faye. She catches up with Miss Charlotte and Mrs Teach to tell them what happened. They realise that the children are being sought by a German master of magic, who is after something else too, something that could change the outcome of the war…

I think that I am going to like this series. The characters are entertaining and in this second book, they are starting to develop a little more. It is set a month after the first book and Stay has written it well. It has the same tension that the first one has and it is a great page-turner.

In some strange way, a lot of it feels plausible, even though it is very much a book about magic and witches. But there was the odd thing that seemed out of place. I would have liked a little more of the back story of Faye being taught by the other two witches. I do like the little nods to other fantasy series buried in the text, it is a nice touch. I thought that the first book had the edge over this one, but that is really splitting hairs. Looking forward to the next one now, and I have just seen that the fourth book has been announced too.

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

We have a lot of ancient history in Dorset, there are many Iron Age hillforts, barrows and henges and we even have the Dorset Cursus. We have a number of stones placed in significant places by the people of that time, but sadly we don’t have many stone circles as Wiltshire, but we do have some.

Brittiany though has so many stone circles and other megalithic monuments. We can only speculate as to why these huge stone menhirs were erected in the landscape but they must have had some ritual or symbolic meaning or reason for people to go to all that effort. I have a book called, The Standing Stones of Europe which has details of them. I haven’t read it yet, but having looked at some of the photos in the book and online, they are quite spectacular.

With each of these sites there is often a story or piece of folklore associated with them, be it Druids or giants, fairies and other supernatural beings. But the stories they began with aren’t always the stories that we know about these days. They have acquired their own folklore along the way, there has been religious appropriation by the church over the years and some have come to be known by relatively modern rituals.

Rather than looking at these neolithic sites on a regional basis, each of the twelve chapters has a theme that links each of the places in one way or other. It begins with Chaos, and looks at the way that stones were naturally left after the last ice age and the legends that became associated with these places, including the elemental forest and boulders of Huelgoat. As early groups of people began to inhabit the landscape they started to move these stones about and erect them in places that had some meaning to them. What that was we will never know, but I know that we can still feel some of the elements that made those particular sites important. The final chapters of the book bring us up to the modern age with memorials that have been created recently in stone and the way that sites have been deliberately destroyed and the way that some people have reused the stones to mark the landscape.

I really liked this book and thought it was fascinating. I know very little about the standing stones in Northern Europe and I thought that this was a really good introduction to them. I like that this is not an academic tome, they can be a little dry after all, but this is a modern take on these places and how they have affected people over time. The drawings by Alan Montgomery throughout the book are really lovely and add a nice touch. If there was one tiny flaw with this, I thought that it could have included some maps of the locations of the sites discussed as one day I would like to visit some of them. It has also reminded me that I need to read some of the other books that I have on these sites.