RaveThe Spectator (UK)The book is packed with these awesome tales ... As much as the book is upbeat and celebratory, Weidensaul is fearless in describing the acute challenges that face the birds he loves ... a superb globe-trotting survey of avian restlessness that reaches one core conclusion. Migrants may seem like here-today-gone-tomorrow nomads but they are really inhabitants of a single place and one living system, on which they and humans depend equally: the entire Earth.
Dan Gretton
RaveNew Statesman (UK)... a complex and exceptional book ... very well written and extraordinarily powerful ... often narrated in the first person and richly illustrated with his own photographs, maps, diagrams or facsimile documents. They all feed into an autobiographical travelogue but also a formal examination of Western moral history ... Be warned, the book requires a strong stomach ... Part of the achievement of his book is to abolish any sense of moral exceptionalism about Nazi atrocities and to demonstrate how Treblinka takes its place in a web of cause and effect that links to both Germany’s past but also to a much wider European contemporary commercial landscape ... Dan Gretton’s profound moral effort in this book is...a guarantee that the truth will be heard.
Jonathan C. Slaght
PanThe Spectator (UK)While sketching in the human background to his mission, Slaght treats his companions too summarily. He lets slip that one assistant had spent 24 years down a Siberian coal mine. What on earth was that like? Alas, we never learn ... Slaght has the astonishing commitment to withstand the rigours of this strange landscape but neither the language nor attentiveness to put his magnificent owl in context.
Oliver Morton
RaveThe New StatesmanMorton blends a profound grasp of astrophysical technicalities with a gift for precise, often poetic prose. He has equally rich insight into the philosophical implications of outer space upon human lives and in The Moon he has left no stone unturned in drawing out its psychological significances ... Morton is very good at the basic Newtonian physics associated with moon motion ... Morton does a great job of recovering the excitement – and, for their time, astonishing technical accomplishments – of the various Apollo missions.
Helen Macdonald
PositiveThe GuardianPerhaps it is because the daughter's grief is so recent and pressing, whereas between Macdonald and White there is much greater emotional distance, but she is a better biographer of White than she is of her own father ... There is a highly polished brilliance to her writing and the short staccato declamatory sentence, sometimes of just a single word, is almost a signature of her style. Yet the syntax carries a persistent subliminal message of stress and anxiety and when we are presented with her repeated, if unsparingly honest, declarations of grief it is as if we already know it before she tells us. The total effect is a seeming excess of strong emotion. Yet elsewhere she deploys the same stylistic elements to immense effect.
