MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Jukes’s account of her year of keeping bees meets all the demands of the new nature-writing genre ... This pressure to fulfil genre expectations diminishes Jukes as a writer. It is unfair to her talent – when she concentrates on bees rather than the bolted-on love affair, she is fascinating, informed and subtle ... Place in that sense is what all nature writing strives to reach. It would be wonderful if in her next book, Jukes were given freedom to roam there unrestricted.
Robert Macfarlane
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)In Underland, Robert Macfarlane descends through abysses of rock and water, and dangles in crevasses of ice and inches along dark tunnels ... Yet the most terrifying section of the book involves nothing more perilous than a guided tour ... It is not the experience that is so frightening, but the purpose of the place and what might happen to it in the future. This is Onkalo in Finland, the world’s first facility for the final disposal of 6,500 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste ... Towards the end of Underland, [Mcfarlane] cites the Kalevala, the nineteenth-century epic poem compiled from Finnish folk tales and mythology. It tells of an underground cavern filled with potent materials that will poison air, water and all life if they are disturbed. He has \'a swift, chilling sense of the Kavevala as part of a messaging system, the warnings of which we have not heeded or even heard\'. It is in such moments that Underland is at its most powerful, bringing to the surface the fears of the Anthropocene.
