When the CoVid-19 outbreak began, I had a hunch that the sitting administration of the United States was ill-prepared to take the necessary steps to address it and keep the population as safe as could be from it. Yet even given my long-established and finely-honed cynicism did I imagine just how ill-prepared they were, and how badly they would bollocks it up, leaving us in the emotionally and economically hamstrung state we find ourselves today. And while I spent much of my free time in the spring of 2020 reading more books than I perhaps normally would have read, I ceased writing in my journal. Looking back, it seems now that it was an unconscious decision, as if I wanted to one day be able to forget it all happened.
Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott, and Peter Marren, however, are made of more resilient stuff than I am – they kept writing. In fact, as the spring of 2020 was shaping itself into what would prove to be one of the visually lovely British springs in recent memory, they “resolved to record their experiences of the coronavirus spring,” which they are now about to see published this coming October as The Consolation of Nature; Spring in the Time of Coronavirus.
Mark Avery has managed to get hold of an advance copy of this forthcoming book (I wish I had his connections…) and in his most recent Sunday Book Review offers us all a preview of, and his thoughts about, what is to be found within its soon-to-be-printed pages. (He’s not too keen on the cover, however; and to be honest, neither am I.)
Links to Mark Avery’s Sunday book reviews appear in The Well-read Naturalist by special arrangement. You can find all of Mark’s past reviews as well as a wide-ranging collection of his other writings on his Standing Up for Nature website. Mark’s opinions regarding the books he reviews are his own.
