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

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A jumping spider the size of my little fingernail can jump upon and kill a large grasshopper, which is roughly equivalent to my leaping upon and devouring a Volvo estate.“ - Yep, they are amazing. The author, with this book, is trying to woo the reader to be amazed enough to do whatever is necessary to protect the natural world. The problem (in my opinion)? The ones reading books such as this one already know and love the natural world and can do little to change the current status quo. *sighs* The Golden Mole is a book of wonder. Katherine Rundell takes a few of our species and writes an impassioned essay on what we should appreciate about them, and why we should make sure we don't lose them. She looks into folk takes surrounding them, their appearances in literature, and the astonishing facts that we do now know about them, many of which are stranger than fiction. She also tells us about the problems that they are facing.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? 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”. 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. An absolute masterpiece of creative nonfiction and of environmental activism. It brings pure wonder towards an animal kingdom thats worth saving. The way it brings together interesting scientific facts about each endangered animal with historical encounters with them (Kings having their shields at a funeral crested with swifts to symbolise everlasting pursuit, new world sailors staring at seals and mistaking them for lost humans, etc) is just astonishing.

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Nevertheless, I very much appreciate what the author did with this book. Not least because even I, animal lover that I am, learned a thing or two that I hadn‘t known before. In The Golden Mole, Rundell dons her metaphorical hat and coat, taking on the guise of a “circus ringmaster” as she points to each animal and asks us to be astonished, for “there is power in astonishment”. Taking inspiration from the American author and activist bell hooks, Rundell hopes to evoke “love that can have in it fury at harm done”. “When I say that love is the precondition for change, I mean a larger kind of love than the Hollywood romance,” a love “that can have in it an active focus, love that is almost indistinguishable from attention. Love that is a kind of iron-willed cherishing that has in it a kind of steeliness.” It takes 150 years for a female to be ready to mate and one animal the scientists know about that is still alive today was around in 1606! The writing inside is compelling, poetic and imaginative. The author includes what might be considered fairly ordinary animals as her subjects such as the seal, the spider, the bat, the hare and the crow. Also included are more unusual creatures such as the narwhal, the pangolin and the Greenland shark as well as the eponymous golden mole. Even that rather clever yet destructive creature, the human, gets a chapter!

I have seen many things that I've loved, but I don't think I'll live to see anything as fine as a raft of lemurs, sailing across the sea towards what looked, until the arrival of humans, like safety."

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. Above all though, what I loved about this book was the sheer beauty of the writing. This is a tremendously erudite book, brimming with scientific and historical research, but all of this is subsumed in Rundell's unceasing sense of wonder at the magnificence of the world around us (wonder and curiosity are perhaps the over-arching theme of all of her books). There are so many phenomenal sentences but here are a couple to give a flavour of her writing: From bears to bats to hermit crabs, a witty, intoxicating paean to Earth's wondrous creatures [...] shot through with Rundell's characteristic wit and swagger." One problem of course is animal tourism. I personally never want to see the mountain gorillas close up - I want them to live their lives in peace. But still people must go on safari and can’t see the harm in getting close to wild animals just to take a nice picture and make ‘Ooooo’ noises. But as Rundell says in the chapter on bats ‘in many thousand ways we whittle away at their numbers for our delight.’

The Golden Mole is another astonishing achievement from Katherine Rundell who is emerging as one of the great writers and storytellers of our age. Having already demonstrated her prowess as a children's novelist and as a literary biographer, she turns her attention to nature writing in this stunning bestiary of twenty-two endangered species, with a short essay on each accompanied by gorgeous illustrations from Talya Baldwin. It is among my proudest boasts, that I was massive Rundell fan before she became a national treasure." Events of recent weeks may have encouraged some to think about longevity and constancy. But when we value “living memory” we seem able only to measure it in human terms. To be truly long-memoried on this Earth, you would probably have to be a Greenland shark. As Katherine Rundell reports, a Greenland shark presently cruising the dark depths of the Arctic Ocean might have been doing so even as the plague swept London. Its great-great-grandparents may have known Julius Caesar, so to speak. It takes 150 years for a female to reach sexual maturity. “For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above ground the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.” They also smell strongly of pee.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

I really loved reading this. It’s left me feeling sad and frustrated about humans and the changes that are happening fast yet it’s left me hopeful too. Hopeful that if we learn more about the world around us we will realise just how incredible, wonderful and complex it is and then fight all the more to protect it.

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and editor of “Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland” (Canongate)