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Category: Ecology & Environment, Natural World

March 25, 2021

Notes From Deep Time: A journey through our past and future worlds by Helen Gordon

Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Deep time has been a persistent theme in British nonfiction over the last couple of years, showing up in books…

February 25, 2021

Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Review by Peter Reason I have been totally absorbed in Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places since it arrived in the morning mail and I…

January 28, 2021

The Fresh and the Salt: The Story of the Solway by Ann Lingard

Reviewed by Peter Reason When I was a small boy—and this memory must reach back to around 1950—I played with a wooden puzzle made…

December 17, 2020

The Stubborn Light of Things by Melissa Harrison & The Consolation of Nature by Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott & Peter Marren

By Rebecca Foster The Stubborn Light of Things collects five and a half years’ worth of Melissa Harrison’s monthly Nature Notebook columns for The…

December 15, 2020

Fifty Words for Snow by Nancy Campbell

Reviewed by Liz Dexter I greatly enjoyed reading Nancy Campbell’s meditation on the icy places of the world, The Library of Ice. last year,…

November 5, 2020

Wintering: A Season With Geese by Stephen Rutt

Reviewed by Liz Dexter Stephen Rutt and his partner move to Dumfries, to a flat near the Solway Firth, just as he’s finishing writing…

September 17, 2020

Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal by Sarah Maslin Nir

Review by Liz Dexter Sarah Maslin Nir is a staff reporter for the New York Times who, by her own admission, has sought out…

September 15, 2020

Riders on the Storm: The climate crisis and the survival of being by Alastair McIntosh

Review by Peter Reason Alastair McIntosh is a Scottish Quaker, peace, community and environmental writer and campaigner, maybe best described as a spiritual activist….

September 8, 2020

The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes

Reviewed by Liz Dexter A book that is in turns entertaining, lyrical and shocking, you won’t think about the countryside – or the rivers…

Entangled Life Merlin Sheldrake
September 3, 2020

Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Review by Peter Reason Entangled Lives by Merlin Sheldrake has been greeted with much enthusiasm, not least by Robert Macfarlane in the New Yorker….

August 27, 2020

Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie

Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Ever since I read Findings sometime around a decade ago I’ve viewed anything with Kathleen Jamie’s name attached to it…

July 28, 2020

Three Wainwright Prize Nominees: Books by Patrick Barkham, Patrick Laurie & Jini Reddy

Reviewed by Rebecca Foster The Wainwright Prize longlists for writing on UK nature and global conservation themes were announced in early June and will…

July 28, 2020

Notes From An Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell

Review by Annabel O’Connell is an Irish journalist who won the Wellcome Book Prize for his previous title, To Be a Machine (which I…

July 9, 2020

Into the Tangled Bank by Lev Parikian

Review by Liz Dexter Lev Parikian is a conductor and, more recently, a birdwatcher, and you might have seen or read his book on…

DIARY OF A YOUNG NATURALIST
July 2, 2020

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

Reviewed by Rebecca Foster When the Wainwright Prize longlists (for writing on UK nature and global conservation themes) were announced in early June, Dara…

June 11, 2020

Wayfinding by Michael Bond

Review by Terence Jagger I found this book absolutely fascinating. I have always been fairly confident in my abilities as a navigator (though with…

Greenery Tim Dee
June 2, 2020

Greenery: Journeys in Springtime by Tim Dee (2020)

Review by Rebecca Foster From the Cape of Good Hope to the Arctic Circle, Dee tracks the spring as it travels north. From first…

May 28, 2020

Tracks: Walking the Ancient Landscapes of Britain by Philip Hughes

Softback review by Liz Dexter This quietly stunning book will appeal to anyone interested in art, landscape, walking, geology, geography, maps and ancient monuments….

Footprints David Farrier
May 26, 2020

Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier

Review by Peter Reason In 2013, a spring storm uncovered, on the shores of Norfolk, the oldest traces of humanity discovered outside Africa: fossil…

April 16, 2020

Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones

Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Back in early March, just before literary events started being cancelled due to coronavirus, I had the good fortune to…

April 14, 2020

The Birds They Sang: Birds and People in Life and Art by Stanisław Łubieński

Translated from Polish by Bill Johnston Review by Peter Reason Stanisław Łubieński first began observing birds in childhood through Soviet binoculars. Later, he took…

April 9, 2020

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Review by Peter Reason There has been a lot of interest recently in the idea of ‘rewilding’, expressed for example in Isabella Tree’s Wilding:…

March 5, 2020

Red Sixty Seven, curated by Kit Jewitt

Review by Peter Reason When I was a small boy, back in the 1950s, I remember going on Sunday School trips to the seaside….

timefulness Marcia Bjornerud
January 21, 2020

Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud

Review by Peter Reason I have on my desk three pieces of rock, collected during my ecological pilgrimage on in the west coast of…

Summer Isles Philip Marsden Granta
October 17, 2019

The Summer Isles by Philip Marsden

Reviewed by Peter Reason The Summer Isles is an account of a single-handed voyage from the south coast of England round the west of…

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