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people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #165,607 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★☆☆☆☆
Not the same writer who produced at least three extraordinary books on the spiritual power of nature
As a reader of Macfarlane’s earlier books start with the old ways and including the lost worlds I looked forward to this book enormously. I’m sorry to say it is mushy rubbish. Where his other books mingled history, facts, and wonder, this book is filled with the sort of gibberish that is generated by lumping some facts and a bit of science (not as much as in his other books) to produce a mushy kind of pathetic fallacy (when inanimate and non verbal things are endowed with human emotions and secret wisdom). This is a really sad decline — even the writing has lost its crispness and clarity. I think I gave up after the hippy/scientist gathering with an illicit bonfire in Epping Forest. I hope that this remarkable voice can find his way back from romanticizing nature to describing its power and necessity
