PositiveSydney Morning Herald (AUS)Clode’s lens is spot-on in the focus she places throughout the book on the inextricability of the koala with its habitat ... The writerly task of synthesising the breadth of this survey is complicated by [the] challenge... of resisting anthropomorphic presumptions while accepting that we humans are storytelling animals. The difficulty of getting this balance right can at times bury Clode’s prose style in dutiful information but at other times it has her singing through. Whatever the case, the humility of her approach encourages us to interrogate the koala information, or lore, even as we receive it, thus promoting the kind of active reading that must surely enhance the way we go on to experience the landscape around us.
Merlin Sheldrake
RaveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)With Entangled Life, Sheldrake proves himself to not only be an excellent inheritor of such a broad range of tutelage, but also a welcome translator of its remarkable implications. He has a talent for threading such broad perspectives into a highly lucid prose, and one gets the feeling that his own interest in the fungiverse is indivisible from his interest in the resonant properties of life itself, which, as he makes plainly clear ... Sheldrake manages to cover almost all the immense scientific and conceptual territories involved in his subject while keeping a light and often humorous touch, even when he is at his most profound. Entangled Life is, for instance, chock full of helpful and compelling analogies for the mycelial networks.
Robert Macfarlane
RaveThe Sydney Morning Herald[Underland] allows [MacFarlane] to continue to satisfy his taste for physical adventure while simultaneously elaborating a narrative analogy for the darkness of our era ... For the most part MacFarlane leaves this inbuilt metaphor to do its own work, rather than enmeshing us in the more obvious fields of depth-psychology, or turning his book into a mythological encyclopaedia. Nevertheless, this is his most meditative book so far and what he is at pains to make explicit here is how we are not separate from, or transcendent of, the planet we live on ... Beneath the fascinating physical adventures of Underland, the story MacFarlane tells is of how the challenges of what has become manifest in our era has forced him to become not just a nature writer but a human nature writer. We watch compelled as a landscape romantic of the old stamp faces our dark materiality as if in real time, while trying to meet the challenge of being, among other things, the father of young children ... Underland is reportage from the inscape, an emotionally grown-up document of adventure and reckoning, which renders us all vulnerable as collaborators in the creation of anthropocenic time.
