RaveThe Times (UK)... excellent ... Slaght’s achievement is to turn the plodding fieldwork into a charming, lyrical and gently uplifting memoir of years spent in pursuit of a strange and beautiful bird. Slaght does justice to the frustration and ennui that accompanies his research without boring the reader. He is also honest about how little he knows about the birds—years into the project he is still unsure how to tell the male from the female fish owl. And yet the narrative never falters. Exquisite prose punctuates his account ... The owl’s sheer oddity draws the reader in. So does the weirdness of the humans who populate the region ... The reader becomes, like the author, \'stunned by the quiet violence of this place.\' This is, though, a hopeful book. Slaght does make genuine scientific breakthroughs. By refusing to glamorise either the region or the occasionally tedious nature of fieldwork, Slaght does justice to the difficult, incremental and error-prone methodology by which we learn new things about our world with the goal of learning to live better within it.
Roger Scruton
MixedLos Angeles Review of Books[W]e glimpse an interesting book that Scruton might yet write where the problems of globalization, consumerism über alles, and ecological decay are examined from the perspective of 19th- and 20th-century conservative thinkers: that damned and discredited lot cast like so many fallen angels from out the Elysian campuses of the modern academy. But for now we must make do with what we have, which is a serious, eccentric, and humorous work that will surprise and disappoint readers who have come to it expecting to have their ideological prejudices confirmed.
