Overview

Conor Mark Jameson has spent most of his life exploring the natural environment and communicating his enthusiasm for it to family, friends and, more recently, readers of a range of newspapers and magazines. Shrewdunnit brings together the best of these dispatches, alongside unpublished essays, in a poetic and evocative journal that inspires and delights. Jameson’s prose is fresh and in places irreverent, with a hint of mischief and a dash of wit. From his back door to the peaks of New Zealand and the swamp forests of the Peruvian Amazon, he carries on the biogumentary style he perfected in his earlier books showing – never telling – how to bring nature and conservation home. He may just have invented a genre. Praise for Silent Spring Revisited “A vividly told, beautifully written account of the environmentalist movement of the last fifty years and his own involvement in it ... the author takes his place among the pre-eminent nature writers of our times. His clear, vivid writing skillfully weaves political and cultural history, personal observation and passionate advocacy for the conservation of our diminishing wildlife to create a book that will endure in the annals of natural history."" Marie Winn “If Nick Hornby loved nature, he might write a book like this.” Martin Harper, RSPB Director of Conservation “A lively read... what makes Jameson’s work especially enjoyable is the personal slant...” Matt Merritt, Editor, Birdwatching “A fine writer, who brings together an artist’s sensibility with a conservationist’s sense of reality... a vital read.” John Fanshawe, Birdwatch Praise for Looking for the Goshawk “Conor’s cultured writing and enthusiasm for the natural world and the people, like him, who care about it, will carry you along through the chapters.” Mark Avery ""Equally stirring as his Silent Spring Revisited... a passionate detective story... descriptive, at times poetic prose..."" Peter Goodfellow, Devon Birds  

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9781907807763

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Reviews

I am pretty well immune to claims of poetic and inspiring prose as I all too often find, instead, prosaic and mundane writing or journalism collected and boiled in the pot. Poetry is often hidden in a style that sets out merely to record such as in Gilbert White, and inspiration more often found in the simplest poetry written not for style but from a hand moved by nature in a land of lost content. However, as I am still reading 'Shrewdunnit' you may suppose the claim not to be totally unjustified. I am just emerged from proof-reading a 650 page tome and, believe me, there is nothing more boring than reading for the umpteenth time something you wrote yourself! So reading the opening pieces in Mr Jameson's book were an unexpected pleasure. It is journalism, but from an essayist, full of fact but expressed with an underlying passion or simple love of the beauty of the countryside and a deep desire to see it return to what it was and could be. Here you find history and country lore, gardening advice and literary allusion with plenty of incidental birdsong. By which I mean that an essay about hedge planting is told in such a way that you can almost hear the Nightingales at the end of the lane or the Blackbird singing from the stump of a newly hewn leylandii. This is a book I shall look forward to dipping into often. -- The Fatbirder Fatbirder website blends environmental knowledge with gentle humour... while these diary pieces are packed with information, their pace is leisured and their tone deceptively simple... There is a quirkiness to his wildlife passions. This warm-hearted book also displays a gift for fine writing... underscores why his RSPB column is so popular. -- Mark Cocker Countryfile, June 2014

""It's a great read, and it's hard to get through it without at least once promising yourself to live a little bit more deliberately, and attentively. Truly inspirational."" -- Matt Merritt BirdWatching Magazine ""blends environmental knowledge with gentle humour... while these diary pieces are packed with information, their pace is leisured and their tone deceptively simple... There is a quirkiness to his wildlife passions. This warm-hearted book also displays a gift for fine writing... underscores why his RSPB column is so popular."" -- Mark Cocker The Biologist

blends environmental knowledge with gentle humour... while these diary pieces are packed with information, their pace is leisured and their tone deceptively simple... There is a quirkiness to his wildlife passions. This warm-hearted book also displays a gift for fine writing... underscores why his RSPB column is so popular. -- Mark Cocker Countryfile, June 2014 It's a great read, and it's hard to get through it without at least once promising yourself to live a little bit more deliberately, and attentively. Truly inspirational. -- Matt Merritt Birdwatching Magazine

It's a great read, and it's hard to get through it without at least once promising yourself to live a little bit more deliberately, and attentively. Truly inspirational. -- Matt Merritt BirdWatching Magazine blends environmental knowledge with gentle humour... while these diary pieces are packed with information, their pace is leisured and their tone deceptively simple... There is a quirkiness to his wildlife passions. This warm-hearted book also displays a gift for fine writing... underscores why his RSPB column is so popular. -- Mark Cocker The Biologist

"""It's a great read, and it's hard to get through it without at least once promising yourself to live a little bit more deliberately, and attentively. Truly inspirational."" -- Matt Merritt BirdWatching Magazine ""blends environmental knowledge with gentle humour... while these diary pieces are packed with information, their pace is leisured and their tone deceptively simple... There is a quirkiness to his wildlife passions. This warm-hearted book also displays a gift for fine writing... underscores why his RSPB column is so popular."" -- Mark Cocker The Biologist"

Author Information

Conor Mark Jameson has written for the Guardian, BBC Wildlife, the Ecologist, New Statesman, Africa Geographic, NZ Wilderness, British Birds, Birdwatch and Birdwatching magazines and has been a scriptwriter for the BBC Natural History Unit. He is a columnist and feature writer for the RSPB magazine, Nature's Home, and has worked in conservation for 20 years, in the UK and abroad. He was born in Uganda to Irish parents, brought up in Scotland, and now lives in England, in a village an hour north of London. His first book, Silent Spring Revisited, was published in 2012 and his second, Looking for the Goshawk, in 2013, both by Bloomsbury. He is a recent recipient of a Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors. When not campaigning for a better, safer planet, and making notes such as those you find here, he tries to find time to tinker with shrubs, and look for goshawks in a variety of habitats.

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