Review: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

Everything is Tuberculosis - The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection by John Green is an in depth examination of tuberculosis (TB), it's causes, history, treatments and cures and why it is that so many people continue to die of the disease each and every year.

TB is an infection caused by bacteria and it's airborne, meaning anyone can catch it. According to the author, between 1/4 and 1/3 of all living humans have been infected with it but only a small percentage of those (up to 10%) will end up becoming sick with active TB. Malnutrition and a weakened immune system can trigger a dormant case of TB to become active, making it largely a disease of poverty.

The author of The Fault in Our Stars began to take a serious interest in the topic when he met a young boy with TB in Sierra Leone. Referring to Henry's case throughout the book enables him to put a face on the disease and Green sets the scene early on when he informs the reader just how many people have died from TB in the last 200 years.

"Just in the last two centuries, tuberculosis caused over a billion human deaths. One estimate, from Frank Ryan's Tuberculosis the Greatest Story Never Told, maintains that TB has killed around 1 in 7 people who've ever lived." Introduction

I remember learning this fact at some point in the last few years and it's precisely the reason I decided to read this book. Also known as consumption, and sometimes referred to as the white plague, tuberculosis is the oldest contagious disease and I wanted to know more about it.

The audiobook is narrated by the author himself and I was most interested in the history of TB and in particular the romanticisation of consumption in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At that time, it was believed TB was only acquired by people with great sensitivity and intelligence. If that wasn't bad enough, women with consumption were thought to become more beautiful, ethereal and wondrously pure. Ugh!

TB is a wasting disease and death was commonly a long and drawn out process during which sufferers became weakened and bed-bound. It's hard to believe now - until you recall the popularity of waif models and the heroin chic style from the 1990s - but this began to affect beauty standards of the time. Patients with active TB became thin and pale with wide sunken eyes and a rosy tint on their cheeks from fever and this beauty ideal became desirable and highly valued. (You can see this reflected in the art and literature of the time).

Green moves on to the science of TB and describes the various breakthroughs in medicine that led to TB eventually becoming treatable and then curable. In 2023, a million people died of TB and while Green acknowledges we can't eliminate TB completely, we can make sure nobody dies from it. So why haven't we?

The author explains that the drugs to treat TB aren't being produced and made available in the countries that need them most. Essentially, the drugs are where the disease is not and the disease is where the drugs are not.

A whole host of factors, including big pharma companies keep drug prices high; only a finite amount of aid sent to foreign countries is allocated to medicine and lack of access to basic medical facilities in poorer countries means that TB goes on to kill a million people unnecessarily each year. Learning TB is basically an expression of injustice and inequity was grim and depressing.

At the end of all this, there was no call to action, no website to donate to or petition to sign which was a lost opportunity in my opinion. Green is clearly calling for global healthcare reform, but provides little for the average reader to do with their frustration at the current situation.

For novels with consumptive characters, I can recommend:
- The Haunting of Mr and Mrs Stevenson by Belinda Lyons-Lee ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Bone China by Laura Purcell ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Laetitia Rodd and the Case of the Wandering Scholar by Kate Saunders ⭐️⭐️⭐️

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: History Stinks!: Wee, Snot and Slime Through Time by Suzie Edge

Throughout June and July I was finally tackling The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas and needed a light audiobook to listen to in my downtime. History Stinks! Wee, Snot and Slime Through Time by Suzie Edge is the second in the History Stinks! series - the first being History Stinks! Poo Through the Ages - and is recommended for readers aged 7 years and over.

Published in April 2025, doctor and historian Suzie Edge turns back time to teach young readers about the history of urine, snot, pus, earwax, vomit, blood, sweat, tears and saliva. Tapping into the fact that kids of a certain age find bodily excretions gross and funny, the author combines her medical knowledge with her love of history to educate us further on this gooey subject matter.

We learn how urine was used by doctors to diagnose patients. 2,500 years ago the physician Hippocrates tasted a patient's urine in order to diagnose their condition. Now considered the father of medicine, Hippocrates was able to utilise this technique to spot conditions like diabetes if the urine was too sweet. He also tasted a patient's earwax; if it was bitter the patient was well, but if it was sweet, the patient was sick.

The chapter on earwax was enlightening as the author tells us medieval monks used earwax to help stick gold leaf to their illuminated manuscripts and to alter the consistency of their ink. Wow!

"Amazingly, earwax can tell us a lot about a person. Archaeologists who find bodies when they are digging in the ground sometimes find them with earwax still there. You can tell what someone liked to eat, the environment that they lived in and what pollutants they were exposed to." Chapter 5, Ewww! Earwax!

Presented in an easily digestible and accessible writing style, the content features regular jokes and info that will no doubt keep kids engaged.

History Stinks! Wee, Snot and Slime Through Time is perfect to listen to in the car with kids who want to know more about gross human bodily excretions and how our knowledge about them has changed over time.

Other books by Suzie Edge include:
Vital Organs - A History of the World's Most Famous Body Parts
Mortal Monarchs - 1,000 Years of Royal Deaths

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: What to Expect When You're Dead by Robert Garland

When the Pope died in April 2025 and his body was put on display for members of the church and the public to pay their respects, I was reminded how jarring it is to today's sensibilities and thought it was a good time to listen to What to Expect When You're Dead - An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife by Robert Garland.

Covering the time period in history 100,000 BC - 400 AD, this audiobook references ancient texts, artworks and archaeology at a level I was largely unfamiliar with. However I did enjoy some of the content, including this quote taken from Greek Playwright Aristophanes (446 BC - 386 BC):

"In Aristophanes Frogs, anyone who has harmed a guest, failed to pay a boy for his sexual favours, struck his mother, punched his father or sworn a false oath is consigned to a sewer full of turds." Chapter 5 Heaven and Hell

The beliefs of many ancient civilisations and religions were offered, in addition to their thoughts on the afterlife, how best to lay the dead to rest and how to honour their ancestors.

As a youngster I was interested in the history of Egypt, the pyramids and of course the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. I was simultaneously disturbed by the fact mummified remains were once desecrated by grave robbers and disturbed in the 'modern era' by archaeologists, with artefacts removed to be sold to private collectors or displayed in museums. It shouldn't come as a surprise then that I relished the legend of the curse of Tutankhamun and enjoyed hearing more about Egyptian curses here:

"Thieves certainly weren't deterred by the stiff penalties they incurred if apprehended, death by impaling being a common punishment. Nor by the curses that the deceased promised to rain down on those who broke into their tombs. A typical Egyptian curse reads as follows: As for anyone who shall violate my corpse in the necropolis or shall damage my image in my chamber, the ka (spirit or soul) of Ra (sun god) shall abhor him. He shall not bequeath his goods to his children nor shall he be restful in life, nor shall he receive water in the necropolis. His ba (personality and soul) shall be destroyed forever.' " Chapter 8, Where to Deposit the Remains

Scary stuff! The book includes beliefs and practices from a range of ancient cultures and traditions, including Early Christian, Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Mesopotamian, Roman and Zoroastrian. I'll admit I was in very unfamiliar territory here, however this did help to clarify that my interest in death rituals is anchored in Western culture closer to my own time. I've shared my interest in the mourning etiquette of the Victorian era in other reviews and have the current books on my virtual TBR to read at some stage in the future:

• Fashionable Mourning Jewellery, Clothing and Customs by Mary Brett
• Mourning Art & Jewellery by Maureen Delorme
• Death in the Victorian Family by Pat Gallant
• Childhood & Death in Victorian England by Sarah Seaton

Narrated by Zeb Soanes, What to Expect When You're Dead - An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife by Robert Garland is recommended for dedicated non fiction readers with an interest in ancient history and ancient civilisations from 100,000 BC - 400 AD. I thought that was me but it turns out that it isn't.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: Unnatural Causes by Dr Richard Shepherd

Dr Richard Shepherd is a Forensic Pathologist in the UK and has performed over 23,000 post mortems. In his memoir, Unnatural Causes - The Life and Many Deaths of Britain's Top Forensic Pathologist he shares highlights from his early career until the time of publication in 2018.

Listening to the author narrate this memoir, his dedication and enthusiasm for the work definitely shines through. His early struggles to interact with the grieving loved ones of the deceased he looks after is also laid bare.

Shepherd worked on some well known cases but the one I was most surprised to read about was the Marchioness disaster.

In 1989, a party boat named the Marchioness was carrying 130 people along the Thames River in London when it collided with another vessel and a total of 51 people died. Identification of the remains at the time came down to fingerprints and dental records, however the bloating of some of the bodies that had taken longer to retrieve led officials to make one of the most horrific decisions in forensic pathology I've ever heard. Specialist equipment that could obtain fingerprints from waterlogged remains was available elsewhere in the country, but the logistics required to transport that many bodies at the time was prohibitive, so a decision was made to remove the hands of the deceased for testing. This was carried out without family approval and even typing these words I'm horrified this took place. However, it MIGHT have been deemed acceptable if those responsible for the process didn't make a complete mess of it. Bodies were given to the families without hands and some families were told they couldn't view the remains of their loved ones by undertakers causing untold additional grief and trauma.

Shepherd is clear that he wasn't responsible for making the decision to remove the hands and had no knowledge of the decision at the time. Understandably this element of the disaster still haunts him and the subsequent hearings and court cases ran for years. I remember reading about the case years ago and being utterly dumbstruck by the incompetence and lack of professionalism shown at the time. Reading Shepherd's involvement in the case, I couldn't help wondering if this memoir was a way for him to 'set the story straight' once and for all on this case and clear his name.

Several other cases the author chose to include were controversial and again I began to speculate that this might be the only avenue for a professional in his field to get his version on the record for the wider public; outside of legal testimony that is.

Some high profile cases - which will be recognised by UK readers - are included and the picture I began to see emerging is that Shepherd felt under valued and under utilised in some cases and unjustly criticised in others.

Interactions with his children and the slight overlap with his work made me uncomfortable and I wasn't surprised - and neither was he - when his marriage broke down. In fact, it reminded me quite a lot of the personal account of Peter Faulding in his memoir What Lies Beneath - My Life as a Forensic Search and Rescue Expert.

I deeply admire the work carried out by forensic pathologists, medical examiners, coroners and those who look after the dead and perhaps that's why I've read so many of their books.* While it's too soon for another just now, True Stories from the Morgue by John Merrick is on my TBR and likely to be the next one on the topic at some point in the future.

Unnatural Causes - The Life and Many Deaths of Britain's Top Forensic Pathologist by Dr Richard Shepherd is recommended for readers with an interest in forensic medicine.

* Other memoirs like this you may want to explore:
- All the Living and the Dead: A Personal Investigation Into the Death Trade by Hayley Campbell
- Personal Effects: What Recovering the Dead Teaches Me About Caring for the Living by Robert A. Jensen
- Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training by Tom Jokinen
- Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Judy Melinek MD & T.J. Mitchell

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: All Buttons Great and Small by Lucy Godoroja

All Buttons Great and Small - A Compelling History of the Button, From the Stone Age to Today by Lucy Godoroja was a dry yet interesting read. The Australian author owns her own button shop in Newtown, Sydney and her shop is called All Buttons Great and Small, inspiring the name of this book.

I'd love to visit her button shop one day, but Godoroja is clear from the start that she's not a collector:

"I am not a collector of buttons. I have always, however, been enthralled by them, and over the past 35 years millions of buttons have passed through my hands." Page 1

Over the course of the book, I began to appreciate the author's interests seem to reside in the creation and design of buttons and their materials across time and cultures. However, I did learn some interesting button facts along the way.

Buttons were worn as an adornment, but I didn't know they once served as a portable means of value for the wearer, as it enabled a person to carry their investment with them in the case of an emergency.

Venetian glassmaking is internationally renowned, but I didn't know the establishment of Murano was an inspired government decision:

"With the burgeoning trade in Venice, in 1291 the government of the day made the decision to relocate the glass industry to the island of Murano, for fear of fires from the furnaces breaking out and spreading to the city centre, but particularly, with the added benefit of being able to shield industrial secrets from prying eyes." Page 66

Buttons could be an expression of wealth and King Louis XIV of France shockingly spent more than $5M on buttons during his reign and once commissioned a set of at least 100 diamond buttons. 

I learned that during the 1790s, the Parramatta Justice Precinct was home to the second convict hospital and evidence has been found of colonial bone button manufacturing on this site. It's assumed the many sew-through buttons discovered by archaeologists were made by hand by the convicts recuperating in the hospital or living in the huts on site.

I learned the difference between pottery and porcelain:

"Clay is the basic material of all types of pottery, but while porcelain is a type of pottery, not all pottery is porcelain. True porcelain is known as 'hard paste' as it requires hard firing at very high temperatures, after which it becomes extraordinarily dense." Page 104

More interesting though was reading the brief section about koumpounophobia, the fear of buttons. Steve Jobs openly admitted suffering from this phobia, hence his preference for wearing skivvies or polo necked tops rather than shirts.

Those few highlights aside, there was way too much information provided on scientific developments and inventions of particular materials used to produce buttons for my liking. I didn't find it interesting at all to read about the evolution of various button making materials, and the chapter entitled The Plastics Evolution - comprising the invention and use of shellac, rubber, semi-synthetics, synthetics, bakelite, amino plastics, acrylic, plexiglass, perspex, lucite, acrylite - nearly sent me to sleep.

Borrowed from the library, button lovers and crafters won't find any button inspired artwork here. There's no chapter about button collections around the world - or within Australia - or research around the discovery and value of rare and precious buttons. High-end fashion designers and their use of buttons was included, but this wasn't of interest to me. There were some stunning colour photographs of buttons throughout this beautifully produced hardback, but ironically the captions didn't contain enough detail. There is an impressive bibliography and index, but no button trading or shopping references in the index or websites to visit.

All Buttons Great and Small - A Compelling History of the Button, From the Stone Age to Today by Lucy Godoroja is an academic button book for serious collectors, sellers or historians interested in the materials used to make buttons from ivory, wood and tortoiseshell right through to metals, alloys and plastics. I have a moderate interest in buttons but unfortunately it didn't extend this far.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: An Immense World by Ed Yong

In An Immense World - How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, science writer Ed Yong takes the reader through a variety of species and their notable senses. These senses include: smell, taste, light, colour, pain, heat, contact, vibrations, sound, echoes and electric and magnetic fields.

Listening to the audiobook narrated by the author, interesting quirks of nature caught my attention along the way. One of those was the fact that the ears of owls are uniquely asymmetric. The left ear of an owl is higher than their right ear, enabling the bird to use the difference in timing and loudness to distinguish sounds in the vertical and horizontal.

When relating just how sensitive the sense of smell is in dogs, the author tells us:

"In past experiments they have been able to tell identical twins apart by smell. They can detect a single fingerprint that had been dabbed onto a microscope slide then left on a rooftop and exposed to the elements for a week. They could work out which direction a person had walked in after smelling just five footsteps. They have been trained to detect bombs, drugs, landmines, missing people, bodies, smuggled cash, truffles, invasive weeds, agricultural diseases, low blood sugar, bedbugs, oil pipeline leaks and tumours." Chapter 1 Leaking Sacks of Chemicals: Smells and Tastes

Insects can taste with their body parts and some have taste receptors on their wings enabling them to identify traces of food as they fly around.

In a chapter about bats and their ability to hunt prey with echo location, the author meets with a bunch of Lepidopterists at their lab. Entering the flight room of the bats, Yong can see a cloud of snow like substance hanging in the air that has come off the moths brought in for the bats to catch. If you've ever caught a moth or butterfly - or even cleaned up a dead one - you'll have noticed the powder or dust that comes off them after handling.

I was surprised to learn this substance is actually made up of tiny scales that serve an important function for moths and butterflies and apparently it's a common occupational hazard for Lepidopterists to become allergic to the scales due to overexposure.

"When not inflaming the airways of scientists, the scales protect the bodies of moths by absorbing the sound of a bats calls and muffling the resulting echoes. This acoustic armour is just one of several anti-bat defences." Chapter 9 A Silent World Shouts Back: Echoes

Very interesting. An Immense World - How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong was a detailed and thorough look at the senses of multiple species in depth and I'll admit my attention started to wander. The frequent references to a creature's umwelt* during the audiobook's 14+ hours of listening time become repetitive and I wished the author had used an alternate phrase from time to time.

An Immense World is recommended for those interested in biology, science, chemistry, physics, nature and the environment.

* I'd never heard of the world 'umwelt' and had to look it up, but it means 'the world as it is experienced by a particular organism.'

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: When Brains Dream by Antonio Zadra & Robert Stickgold

Published in 2022, When Brains Dream - Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep by Antonio Zadra & Robert Stickgold was my latest choice in books about sleep and dreaming. Largely academic in nature, the book mentions many scientific sleep studies and may be a dry read for some.

According to the authors, we dream in all phases of sleep and most people dream for at least two-thirds of the night. Some researchers believe we dream all night but if you don't believe you dream at all, you do, you just don't remember your dreams on waking. Often something can happen later in the day to trigger the memory of a dream and I can still conjure the memory of dreams from days, weeks and months ago.

I'll admit I was excited early on in this book when I read:

"... we can think of dreams as either real life; portals into equally real or alternate worlds; messages and prophecies from the gods; unfulfilled wishes; random brain noise; nocturnal entertainment; communications from the future, the dead, or other minds; sources of personal insights, problem solving, and creativity; or a window into memory processing." Page 9

Hopes the authors were going to expound on each of these topics were soon dashed as I realised I was in for a scientific and academic look into dreams and dreaming. Having said that, I'd love to share my key takeaways.

It was reaffirming to read about the process proving stimuli received during sleep like smells and sounds can actively influence the dream you're having. I'm pretty sure we've all experienced the phenomenon where the sound of your alarm begins as something else in your dream before you wake up and realise it's actually your alarm going off. In one study, the smell of a burnt match or drop of water on a participant's forehead had a direct impact on the content of the dream they were having. Interesting, right? Although I did find myself chuckling at the thought of the participant waking up to a researcher with a lit match near their head.

Also reaffirming previous learned information was the correlation between the use of smart phones and insomnia. You can't fail to notice that most people turn to their phones in moments that were once spent zoning out or gazing into the distance while waiting for something or someone. Now, any moment of spare or dead time has users reaching for their device, however this leaves no time for the brain to process thoughts during the day.

Later, when the lights go out and the phones and tablets are silent and on charge, our mind is flooded with all sorts of thoughts from the day. This makes sense as pre-sleep is the brain's opportunity to sort through the day and tag any concerns for later processing during sleep. With that in mind, we should allow ourselves to zone out and be with our thoughts more often. This doesn't mean we need to meditate but you don't need to kill time or multitask all the time, just be with your thoughts.

"Our dreams rarely come to neat endings. The most common end for a dream report is, 'And then I woke up.' the dreaming brain doesn't plot out whole stories." Page 142

When we dream the mind wanders from topic to topic in a haphazard manner in the same way our daytime thoughts have no logical structure during waking hours. Another interesting tidbit in When Brains Dream was the fact that those who were born before the introduction of colour TV actually dreamed in black and white about 40 per cent of the time.

On the content of dreams:

"At a more global level, the dreamer is usually faced with some kind of problem. These can range from relatively minor difficulties - planning a course of action, trying to make sense of a situation, or finding a lost object - to serious physical or psychological dangers such as being lost, falling ill, facing interpersonal conflicts, dealing with environmental hazards, or fleeing from physical perils." Page 157

Typical dreams include dreaming of falling, being late for something, being chased, and school and study related dreams. Do you have a recurrent dream? I'd love to know!

I'm a lucid dreamer but researchers have now been able to communicate with advanced lucid dreamers in a lab with a set of pre-arranged signals. When the participant enters a dream state they communicate with researchers via a series of eye movements at the beginning of a pre-set task and when they complete it. Now that's wild!

I enjoyed seeing the list of reality checks to perform while dreaming to determine if you're awake or dreaming, they include:

"These can take many forms, including trying to read, staring at yourself in a mirror, turning on a light in a dark room, or trying to push your fingers through your palm. In most dreams, you will experience difficulties reading, mirror reflections quickly become unstable, light switches fail to work properly, and your fingers may pass through your palm or give rise to other unusual sensations." Page 238

According to the authors, carrying out these reality checks can help you realise if you're dreaming or not.

It's widely accepted that most people can't read in their dreams, but after reading this book I focussed on my lucid dreaming ability and was actually able to read in a dream I was having! I was on a plane and was able to read the title of the book the person across the aisle from me was reading. I could also read the text on a computer screen that showed an email sent by the previous passenger. Apparently this is a rare feat so I'm pretty proud to have taken my love of reading into my dreams.

When Brains Dream - Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep by Antonio Zadra & Robert Stickgold is recommended for the dedicated non fiction reader familiar with the basics of sleep who wants to delve into the latest scientific developments.

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: Mortal Monarchs - 1000 Years of Royal Deaths by Suzie Edge

Mortal Monarchs - 1000 Years of Royal Deaths by Suzie Edge gives the reader a short overview of the deaths of 48 monarchs in England and Scotland over the last 1000 years. Beginning with the demise of Harold Godwinson in 1066 and concluding with the death of George VI in 1952, a chapter is devoted to each monarch.

Listening on audiobook, the chapters vary from approx 4-15 minutes in duration, and I found them to be just the right length. However, as I realised just how many deaths the author needed to cover, the repetitive format did start to become a little tedious. Fortunately the short chapters meant I could return to the book every now and again for another monarch's bloody passing from consumption, sweating sickness, dysentery or war wounds.

The author is a medical doctor and historian and when listening to the chapter dedicated to King Henry V who died of dysentery in 1492, I learned more about how the body expels a pathogen through either vomiting or diarrhoea.

"Diarrhoea is the body's way of getting rid of bacteria causing problems within the gut by emptying out toxins or poisons fast. For faeces to leave the body in a hurry, we cannot just rely on the action of peristalsis, the normal push/pull movement of the gut tubes that move the human waste along. If you still need more of a push, then the abdominal muscles will help by contracting. They squeeze as hard as they can to push out faecal matter fast. That is why it hurts. It can also be worryingly dehydrating as water is pulled into the gut to help dilute and remove the offending bacteria." Chapter 17

This was a huge revelation to me. Firstly, I had no idea that water is pulled into the gut from around the body, which is what causes the dehydration symptoms of headache and so on. Secondly, I had no clue that the water was pulled into the gut in order to dilute the offending bacteria and ease its passage. I guess I never gave much thought to where the water came from or why it was there, but next time - let's hope it's far into the future - I'll be more informed.

Fortunately, Mortal Monarchs was published during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II and so it doesn't include her death in 2022. This does date the book now that Charles III is King, but as a royalist, I don't feel the book is lacking. I think it'd be strange to read an updated version where her cause of death was included and discussed in this manner.

Mortal Monarchs will appeal to trivia and history buffs and I just wish I could retain all of the monarchs names in order and the dates and means of their passing.

Having read Vital Organs - A History of the World's Most Famous Body Parts and History Stinks! Poo Through the Ages, I continue to learn from Dr Suzie Edge, so I'm looking forward to the release of History Stinks! Wee, Snot and Slime Through Time in 2025. I can't imagine what I'll learn about the human body but I'll be sure to let you know!

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Review: The Life of Birds by David Attenborough

David Attenborough is a biologist, natural historian and international treasure and I don't know why it's taken me this long to read one of his books. In a continuation of my recent stretch of nature books, The Life of Birds by David Attenborough was an enlightening read.

Covering a range of birds from all over the world, the book is chock full of information and new-to-me facts like this one:

"One of the heaviest of all flying birds is the swan. A full grown one may weigh close to 16 kilos." Page 37

Outlining the different phases of a bird's life cycle, The Life of Birds covers flight, birdsong, mating rituals, the laying of eggs and nurturing of young.

The audiobook was easy and informative to listen to and the book offers a limited number of colour photos. As a consequence, you can't see all of the birds mentioned or the behaviour being described. But let's face it, while I might be able to find 10 hours a month to listen to an audiobook, I'm never going to invest that amount of time watching bird documentaries; even at the hands of a legend like David Attenborough.

Back to the book and I was fascinated to learn that geese fly in a V formation to take advantage of the slip stream, which is strongest at the wing tip of the bird ahead of them. Not only that, flapping in unison gives even greater advantage to all but the lead bird at the front of the formation. Just as in cycling, the birds take turns at the front so that they all share in the work. Fascinating!

A mature oak tree can generate ninety thousand acorns in a season which I found truly astonishing. Some birds like the jay bury individual acorns, using local landmarks to remember the location of each cache, and sometimes placing pebbles and stones nearby as markers. Meanwhile, other birds stash their acorns in the same location.

"Willow tits hold the record for the number that an individual bird will store in a day - over a thousand. The nutcracker, a European relative of the crow, collects the greatest number to be gathered in a single season - up to one hundred thousand." Page 64

This reminded me of the woodpecker responsible for storing 317 kilos (700 pounds) of acorns in the wall of a homeowner's house in California.

When describing the gargantuan appetite of young chicks in the chapter entitled The Problems of Parenthood, Attenborough tells us:

"A great tit, which feeds its young with beakfuls of insects, may deliver food to its nest nine hundred times a day." Page 215

Wow. If you love birds, nature or the work of the great David Attenborough, you'll enjoy The Life of Birds. Gotta fly!

My Rating:

★ ★ ★ ★ ★