Tag: Book review
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The Starling: a Biography
The Starling: a Biography, by Stephen Moss, Square Peg, 2024. Stephen Moss is a prolific author and I have read and enjoyed many of his works. And I am extremely fond of Starlings. The stunning dust-wrapper image is from: Lilford (Lord, Thomas Littleton Powys). Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands. Seven volumes. …
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Fledgling
The young birds in the garden are doing really well. Yesterday there were as many as six little Blue Tits on the feeders or at the bird bath at once. There’s just one Great Tit now, there are not so many sparrows, even the Jackdaws are fewer in number, as is to be expected at…
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The Flow. Book review. Part IV
The Flow, Rivers, Water and Wilderness, by Amy-Jane Beer, Bloomsbury Wildlife 2023 This must be the longest review I have written, which goes to show how much I love the book – and all I am doing is sharing the sparkliest gems. Amy-Jane Beer writes about another fascination of mine in the chapter ‘Light and water’…
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The Flow. Book review. Part III
In the ‘Eddy’ entitled ‘Flow’ the author is writing mostly about finding her mojo, getting into the zone, when it comes to kayaking but here she is on writing, first citing the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who published his Flow Theory in 1975, “describing a state of mind exemplified by trained and motivated individuals performing complex,…
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The Flow. Book review. Part II
The Flow, Rivers, Water and Wilderness, by Amy-Jane Beer, Bloomsbury Wildlife 2023 There is a very great deal to learn from this book as we join Amy-Jane on actual or imagined journeys along rivers and streams and springs. Here is the author on a phenomenon entirely unknown to me, beautifully written: “Those that are less choked…
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Avian Architecture. Book review. Part II
Avian Architecture, How Birds Design, Engineer and Build, by Peter Goodfellow, Princeton University Press, 2024, revised and expanded edition. With a foreword by consultant editor Professor Tony D. Williams. See earlier post: Avian Architecture. Book review. Part I – Animal Wild I began Part I with this: “In a sense it is a bold title. Whilst no…
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Avian Architecture. Book review. Part I
Avian Architecture, How Birds Design, Engineer and Build, by Peter Goodfellow, Princeton University Press, 2024, revised and expanded edition. With a foreword by consultant editor Professor Tony D. Williams. Having had a fair few disappointments in my reading lately, this is one I have been saving up and it absolutely does not disappoint. Unsurprisingly, given…
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100 Words for Rain. Book review
100 Words for Rain and everything else you needed to know about British weather by Alex Johnson, National Trust Books, 2024. This a charming, light-hearted, interesting and informative book but it is not without flaws. There is no information about the author but he comes across as thoroughly likeable and someone who does not take…
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Ten Birds That Changed the World, a book review
Ten Birds That Changed the World, by Stephen Moss, Guardian Faber, 2023. I am not sure that I should even call this a book review, since I have only read two and a half chapters, which makes it unfair, but I am past the age of feeling that I absolutely have to finish every book…
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Index, A History of the, Part II
A review of Index, A History of the; a bookish adventure by Dennis Duncan, Allen Lane, 2021. One of the many things which delight me about this book is the way in which it sets my mind off on tangents and brings back forgotten memories. We enter the territory of the index as a repository of wit…
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Index, A History of the, Part I
A review of Index, A History of the; a bookish adventure by Dennis Duncan, Allen Lane, 2021. The photograph of the author, a translator and lecturer in Eglish at University College London, which adorns the dust-jacket of this brilliantly titled book shows a man (I hope he wouldn’t mind) with a cheeky and hugely likeable…
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James Bond behind the Iron Curtain
A review of Bond Behind the Iron Curtain by James Fleming, The Book Collector, 2021. This is an attractively and elegantly produced book by Ian Fleming’s nephew. Ian Fleming founded The Book Collector in 1952, an erudite and unique quarterly periodical, and it is now edited by James. I was asked to write an article…
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Your Neighbour Kills Puppies; Inside the Animal Liberation Movement
Your Neighbour Kills Puppies; Inside the Animal Liberation Movement, by Tom Harris, Pluto Press, 2024, with a superb foreword by Chris Packham. He’s good at forewords, amongst many other things, which is why I asked him to write the foreword for my first book, Animal Trust. This is a boisterous, rollicking, relentless account of protests…
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A Short History of the World in 50 Lies
By Natasha Tidd, illustrated by Emily Feaver, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 2023. With so much to cover in under 300 pages, beginning with the Achaemenid Persian Empire from 550 BC and ending with the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, this proceeds at a breakneck pace and is necessarily pretty dense. The author’s irreverent wit, knowledge and…
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Nuts & Bolts part II
Nuts & Bolts; Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), by Roma Agrawal, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023. This book continued to enlighten and inspire me to the end. There is no banging of drums, but the world view imparted by my Western education at least (and I’m guessing not much has…