Colin TudgeRezensionen

An excellent book. After an introduction to evolution and bird physiology and an overview of species, it gives information on mating, child rearing, migration, feeding and social structure. A nice mix, primarily of science, but with a bit of philosophy for good measure

The first third was quite good. The second third was a slog. The final third was good enough (barely) to keep me reading to the end. Essentially, the bulk of the interesting material was covered better by other books I've read over the last couple of years (e.g., [b:The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World|28256439|The Hidden Life of Trees What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World|Peter Wohlleben|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1464281905s/28256439.jpg|48295241], [b:A Natural History of North American Trees|567816|A Natural History of North American Trees|Donald Culross Peattie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348962010s/567816.jpg|554885], [b:The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors|31522121|The Songs of Trees Stories from Nature's Great Connectors|David George Haskell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1474519192s/31522121.jpg|52206884]).

I love birds and love reading about them but this book was just okay. The author repeats himself a lot (especially "some birds are more equal than others" and especially this phrase in the first chapter. It was fun at first but it quickly just got annoying). This book had some fun anecdotes but it was missing something and could have used some references as he keeps crossing the line between fact and opinion without stating where it changes. Especially since he states at the start that he is not actually scientist. He does provide a (partial?) reference list at the end but some statements really need the study/studies backing them up in the text itself. I don't have time to go through all of them to fact check and find out what has been shown and what he thinks.

Also, I don't really understand the need for such a long list of bird families. He really didn't provide much information about most of them. I also wonder how much the editors actually read this part in detail as I had a look at the starlings (since I have spent a lot of time studying them) and after about two sentences he says - but more on this later. This family is only briefly mentioned once or twice more in the book. I didn't see anything factually incorrect in the parts I did read (based on the then data since things have changed a bit since then) but small things like this bothered me.

While not bad and I'm sure bird lovers will still enjoy this book, I would recommend reading other books on bird behaviour over this one.

paperback

paperback

I’m more than halfway through this via both audio and e-book. If you’re a fan of plants, this is a great, sweeping overview of trees. It has a lot of content and does a decent job of conveying the wonderfully bizarre variations of woody plants. It is a bit dry though. I will finish it when I’m in the mood.

I’m more than halfway through this via both audio and e-book. If you’re a fan of plants, this is a great, sweeping overview of trees. It has a lot of content and does a decent job of conveying the wonderfully bizarre variations of woody plants. It is a bit dry though. I will finish it when I’m in the mood.

I like learning about trees but I have difficulty retaining any of the knowledge I learn about trees. I expect that will be the case after this detailed and fascinating study of trees. The bulk of this book is an encyclopedic breakdown of trees around the world by family, genus, and species. It's full of fascinating tidbits. My favorite section of the book, "The Life of Trees," is full of interesting stories of how trees function including a symbiotic relationship among fig trees, wasps, and nematodes. The book can be dry at times, but has enough interesting facts and anecdotes to keep it interesting for a dilettante.

Mixed views on this book about trees, what they are and how they live. The writing (including some bizarre segues into unrelated topics) is hit and miss, but funny and engaging most of the time. The thrust behind the book (education and philosophy with trees) is positive and well held together. The information presented is excellent, but with some unfortunate bias. The result is a good book that maybe would have been better with a more cut-throat editor.

The edition that I read was the hardback illustrated, and it is a beautiful object.

A reasonable read, which for me was in the wrong order. The depiction of the trees and their genera and taxonomy needed to come at the end of the book rather than discussing physiology after half way through. Some lovely illustrations and an interesting take on what could be the future of green economics as well as some wide ranging discussions on climate change
This is an ode to trees. It’s just not sung as well as it sounds it might.½

Hmmmmmm..... I have mixed feelings about this book. There is a lot of information about Trees and the writing style isn't bad, but the middle section is rather tedious. The book has a few black and white sketches/illustrations of trees. My edition of the book [ISBN 9780307395399] also has very thin pages (maybe recycled) and a flimsy cover. If you are buying this you may want to get a different edition or the hardcover version.

The book is divided into parts:

Part 1: What is a Tree? Explains what a tree is and its structure. This section is very interesting.

Part 2: All the Trees in the World. Description of tree classification and trees. Long and tedious. Reminds me of a botany text book without all the coloured photographs.

Part 3: The Life of Trees. Describes how trees function, includes photosynthesis, water transfer from roots to leaves, nutrients in the soil, micorrhizae, growth, hormone function, reproduction, pollination, symbiosis, photoperiodism, and biogeagraphy. This is also a very interesting section that is nicely explained - the best part of the book in my opinion.

Part 4: Trees and Us. Concluding section that provides food for thought about our relationship with trees and the earth.


If all you are after is how trees function then I recommend Botany for Gardeners by Brian Capon. [b:Botany for Gardeners|594467|Botany for Gardeners|Brian Capon|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388266055s/594467.jpg|581183] Otherwise, The Tree by Colin Tudge is a nice addition to the reference library.

A natural history of what trees are, how they live, and why they matter

My original The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live & Why They Matter audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge doesn’t list that it is an ordered history of trees. But, the lack of order makes this book less a factual text than winding inquiry. If you’ve ever walked into a forest and started asking the big questions, and started answering them, you’ll get a feel for how this book works. At eight minutes shy of twenty hours, the book is comprehensive, but not cumbersome. I listened to the book on my way up and down a bike trail that stretches a marathon’s distance to a 13 story bridge that spans the Des Moines River valley. I started paying attention to the trees on the way up and down that trail in a different way. I didn’t start recognizing trees and start spouting Latinate names, but gained an appreciation for the difficulty one has in giving names to living things’ relationships.

The book asks direct questions with few words that lead to graduate-level philosophic answers rooted in facts. I’m paraphrasing, but some of the questions include: How do we define a tree? Why isn’t a banana plant a tree? Why are there different names for the same tree? Tudge is both thorough and clever with his answers. As I listened to the book I found myself longing to speak to other people and ask them what they thought. Where textbook chapters represent pieces of a large body of information, The Tree takes a single idea, and expands, builds, and welcomes divergent ideas.

One divergent idea is the move from appreciating trees as an environmentalist advocate might, because humans would die without them. Instead, like Muir, Tudge humanizes trees and their plight against other evils besides humans. We don’t often think trees have natural predators. Tudge adds a wisdom that trees have in working with other tree species and animal to survive. Trees are cooperative, dynamic, and on a time scale greater than our human lifetimes.

Should you invest in this book? It depends on what you hope to get out of a comprehensive history. If you want efficiency in learning about trees, the book will disappoint. It is not a textbook or guide. But if you can let go of efficiency, listen on headphones while walking through trees or closing your eyes in a concrete urban place, you will find yourself asking to bring others into the story. The book is vibrant with detail, soaked in clever language, and solid with a scientist’s backing. In short, The Tree is long on what makes audiobooks brilliant, a chance to relax and just let someone else talk without wanting or trying to interrupt.

After this long journey alone with The Tree, you may want to take the next audiobook trek with a human. I recommend Hiking Through by Paul Stutzman narrated by Mike Chamberlain or Lab Girl, written and narrated by Hope Jahren.

Narrator Review

Be prepared to relax, there is no hurry in this Scottish narrator’s voice and he takes his commas and periods seriously. At first, you’ll notice the narrator, his cadence contrasts that of most audiobooks, but gradually he becomes a cooling tree’s shadow. Most good books begin in media res, the middle of the action. With a book like this, Enn Reitel becomes the great asset, letting the listener know it is a twenty-hour hike, no need to sprint at the start. Soon after you put the headphones in, he becomes funny, in an understated way, hitting the scientific punchlines Tudge wrote expertly. You’re walking through the forest with your new best friend upset to leave at the end.

Audiobook was provided for review by the publisher.

Well, I'm not terribly well-versed on paleo-anthropology, but I followed the science of this just by reading attentively - it was that clearly written.

I found both the Young chapters (more about Ida and her scientists, roughly) and the Tudge chapters (more about the big picture of how primate evolution is being worked out, roughly) fascinating.

I loved the close-up pictures of Ida and other fossils, and the explanations of how scientists can tell so much about a critter from a fragments of a jaw (and why it's so often only the jaw that is found). I loved the description of the Eocene world and of the significance of the Messel pit.

If you're looking for an adventure of how some cool dudes found the earliest ancestor of people, don't read this. If you want to learn about primate evolution, do.

Tudge is exasperated by our inability to feed the world's population, and posits how to not only defeat hunger, but do so in an ecological, human, healthy way.

"For in truth, there is no such thing as cheap food. If chickens ever sell in the supermarket for 75 cents a pound as they often do, or cans of fruit are offered at three for the price of two, then we can be sure that some person or society or animal or landscape, somewhere along the supply chain, is being screwed. Some farmer is working for less than the cost or production; his workers are paid slave-wages; the animals are packed in cages, with the lights dimmed, and a body-full of growth promoters; some hillside is being eroded, some forest felled, some river polluted--and all the creatures who used to live in those hills and forests and rivers, and all the people who enjoyed them and made their living from them, are being swept aside...Food is cheap only because, for various reasons, the true costs are not taken into account."
"In short, the task before us is not to confront big governments and the corporates, for that is merely exhausting. We need instead to create viable and clearly superior alternatives, and allow the status quo to wither on the vine."

While the Ida fossil is probably not a direct link fossil for humans to primates, it is still a really important discovery.

Diante de uma descoberta, o que se imaginava saber a respeito da origem dos primatas pode mudar. Guardada em um dos mais famosos museus de história natural do mundo, está o fóssil de um primata, batizado de 'Ida' pelos pesquisadores que verificaram sua procedência. Ida reescreve a história de ancestrais antigos. Colin Tudge conta a saga de Ida e seu lugar no mundo - trata-se de um relato sobre uma história científica. 'O elo - a incrível descoberta do ancestral mais antigo do ser humano' oferece uma investigação sobre Ida e as origens do homem.½

This interesting, short book attempts to completely revise the accepted views on the origins of agriculture. Tudge suggests that early humans began to manipulate their food supply by spreading favored food plants, burning to control weeds and pests and other techniques long before formal agriculture developed. This was the favored way of life for millennia, until environmental changes and population pressure forced groups in some areas into permanent agriculture as a lifestyle.

Interesting thesis, succinctly stated.

This book sits proudly on my bookshelf. I found this almost magical. It really does make you apppreciate the true variety of life.

O elo - a incrível descoberta do ancestral mais antigo do ser humano' oferece uma investigação sobre Ida e as origens do homem.

Genetic engineering is an incredible technology with many controversial applications. This book as a very approachable primer on those possible applications and the ethical issues they raise. While the science is handled very well and the author didn’t spend enough time on the basics to bore me, I do think the science is written simply enough that someone with no background could understand this book with a little effort. The author does an incredible job starting with the basics. Every biology term is defined. And this allows him to use biology terms and build up to more complicated concepts. For instance, instead of answering the question “what is genetic engineering” in a watered down way, he first explains basic molecular genetics and then the specific methods that people use to alter genomes. Unfortunately, the illustrations were bad enough to be basically useless, but the explanations were good enough that I don’t think the illustrations were needed any way.

I think the aspect of the book most likely to challenge readers is the dense language and focus on philosophy. The book is written in a very intellectual manner, which of course means much larger words than are needed are used. This could be a bad thing but the author did a very impressive job of imbuing the writing with his personality and occasional humor despite the dense language. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that done so well before.

The topics covered were very broad, including everything from genetically modified food to genetically engineering humans. The ethical questions addressed were very interesting, as were the author’s perspectives, and the personal writing style made the questions even more engaging. Honestly, I think this book probably would have been a 4 star review for me under other circumstances, but with getting into school and reading lots of papers on genetic engineering it was kind of a long haul to get through. However, I would highly recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in philosophy or genetic engineering, as the biology is written clearly enough that anyone interested could probably understand the concepts.

originally published on Doing Dewey.

My current writing obsession is trees, which, of course, requires that I read about trees. I found Colin Tudge's compendium to be comprehensive & utterly fascinating (I admit to nodding off a bit while reading the more technical chapters in which he surveys trees as botanically classified into order, family, & genus--at the same time I was intrigued by many unexpected relationships among both herbaceous & woody species). Although Tudge doesn't mention Canadian tree ecologist Diana Beresford-Krueger, his comments on the necessity of intelligent forestry & sustainable tree cropping (past & future) & their foundational importance to human culture & sustenance on Planet Earth, reminded me of Beresford-Krueger's The Global Forest, another favorite read of recent times. Along with another recent read, Charles Mann's 1491, The Tree also caused me to pause & reconsider received notions of both wilderness & the human shaping & management of what we call Nature. I recalled a comment I read long ago (either one made by Joseph Chilton Pierce or Joseph Campbell) that humans' natural home is the Garden, not the Wilderness. Pushing that conclusion even further, I've had to consider the possibility that wilderness may be more mythical than "natural." At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that it is trees, not human beings, that are "ultimately controlling all life on land."

Quite a technical book with sections that a layperson like me could struggle with. Other sections are repetitive and iy feels like they actually have very little to say about Ida herself. However, overall an interesting read.

Upon finishing The Link my first thought was that I could easily divide it into the interesting parts (at the beginning and the end) and the boring and dry (the middle). Then I read the acknowledgments at the end of the book and discovered that it was written by two authors and one of them wrote the parts I liked, the other wrote the dry middle section.

I think the authors really missed an opportunity with this book. I say that because it has a lot of information that could have made for a compelling and interesting read. Unfortunately the writing was so dry, with many lists and descriptions of ancient animals and their habitats, that I quickly lost interest.

The first and last sections of the book will appeal more to the general public. They contain the story of the discovery of Ida and discuss the possible effects that discovery could have on the scientific community and future research. There are also some nice color photos included in the book, as well as diagrams and three dimensional reconstructions of Ida's fossil.

There was a lot of potential for this to be an exciting popular nonfiction book, and if that was what the authors were going for then they really mistook their audience, particularly in the dryer, more scientific section of the book. So what turned me off from this book? The bulk of it reads like a textbook, briefly cataloging and describing the various animals of the time. Interspersed are interesting tidbits, but you have to hunt for them (or have an unusual love of textbook-style writing). On one hand the information on geology and evolution is introductory, on the other it is written using such dry scientific and technical terms that the non-academic reader will probably lose interest.

Detailed scientific information is not a bad thing in and of itself, except the text then drones on and on about each type of animal in the Messel area during the Eocene. It reads like a catalog or index of animals. Here's an example:

Though we have only one of its bones from Messel Pit - a femur found a very long time ago, in mining days - the biggest of all the Messel birds was Gastornis, which stood more than six feet (2 meters) high and yet was stocky, weighing in at 220 pounds (100 kilograms), with a head as big as a modern pony's and a huge eaglelike beak. Here the American connection is very strong, for Gastornis seems to be more or less the same as the American Diatryma. Page 85

And it continues in that style, animal description after animal description.

If you have a deep desire to know about the many different types of animals that lived in the Eocene in the area of the Messel Pit, then by all means pick up this book. I do think that I have a better understanding of the Eocene and Ida's place in evolutionary history after reading this book, I just wish it wouldn't have been so boring.

I received a free copy of this book for review via Goodreads.