The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure: 'A rare and magical book.' Bill Bryson

£7.495
FREE Shipping

The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure: 'A rare and magical book.' Bill Bryson

The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure: 'A rare and magical book.' Bill Bryson

RRP: £14.99
Price: £7.495
£7.495 FREE Shipping

In stock

We accept the following payment methods

Description

A book as rare and precious as a golden mole. A joyous catalogue of curiosities that builds into a timely reminder that life on planet is worth our wonder." And the final criterion was just love: creatures I longed to have an excuse to spend a month or so reading books about. The Golden Mole – the only iridescent mammal, which does not know that it shines – is one of my favourites – and lent itself to the broader idea of golden and treasure. (In the sense that, what is the finest treasure? It’s the living world, and the earth it depends on.)

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops KR: In a dream world – I don’t think this will ever happen – I’ve never seen a hummingbird (there are none in Europe: people who think they’ve seen one have usually seen a hummingbird hawk moth) so I would love to go to Cuba to see the Bee Hummingbird – the smallest bird in the world, which weighs less than two grams. They have iridescent throats, and are just five and a half centimetres long – barely the length of a finger. KR: I think there are the things that we’re all, now, aware of: eat less meat; reinvest what money we might have in funds which have divested themselves of fossil fuels; own less; treat domestic flights as the behaviour of the malarially unhinged. Those are important; in part, as the activist Wendell Berry says, as a kind of speech: they assure yourself and those around you that you mean what you say. But it’s primarily a political problem, which will need political answers: we will need governments that believe in global cooperation, that will have the will and purpose and courage to make bold decision for the sake of the future of the planet.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. The world is more astonishing, more miraculous and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this passionately persuasive and sharply funny book, Katherine Rundell tells us how and why. KR: I do! I have several full notebooks, and a cascade of notes on my phone, many of which I’ll never use. Frank Cottrell Boyce, a writer I admire hugely, always says that writers should keep a diary: but that it should be by force limited to a single sentence a day: the most interesting, funniest, saddest thing you heard that day, so that at the end of the year you have 365 interesting sentences. I’m imperfect at keeping up with it, but I love the idea. Often my single sentence will be a note of something I read about the natural world. Rundell is very strong on the tales humans have told about the natural world. We now know that unicorn horns were actually narwhal tusks, that hedgehogs are lactose intolerant, that drinking bats’ blood does not make you invisible. But we are still making mistakes, and we still know very little. Take the Somali golden mole, whose entry on the International Union for Conservation of Nature list says “data deficient” because “we do not know what shares the world with us, and in what numbers”.

KR: The World Wildlife Fund for land, whose work I’ve admire all my life, and a wonderful small charity called Blue Ventures for the sea. In November’s C&TH Book Club , Belinda Bamber talks to Katherine Rundell about her new book, The Golden Mole, a gilt-edged treasury of animals that invites readers to reopen their eyes to the endangered glories of the natural world. Katherine has also just won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non Fiction 2022 for her previous book, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, a biography of the poet.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

Delivery & Returns

Fruugo

Address: UK
All products: Visit Fruugo Shop