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

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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!

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* When it comes to what we should do, however, things get a bit woolly. After a typically vivid account of seahorse courtship and reproduction, Rundell urges us to “remember the seahorse” every morning and “scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep” or, a bit more practically, to “refuse to eat anything that is taken from the ocean by overexploitative nonselective fishing”. Elsewhere, she makes the rather vague suggestion that we “urgently seek out ways to aid child nutrition” in impoverished countries, so that people there are not forced to hunt endangered creatures. It is a pity that this element of the book is so thin and impractical. Yet Rundell is incapable of writing a dull sentence and it could hardly be bettered as an exuberant celebration of everything from bats, crows and hedgehogs to narwhals and wombats It is among my proudest boasts, that I was massive Rundell fan before she became a national treasure." Kathleen Jamie is a poet and editor of “Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland” (Canongate)

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Every chapter has a quite adorable drawing of the respective animal (except for the last one, thank goodness). An exuberant celebration of everything from bats, crows and hedgehogs to narwhals and wombats . . . Rundell is incapable of writing a dull sentence.’ Observer Rundell shows us that the human imagination often looks pedestrian next to nature’s real ingenuity; our fairytales can seem like mundane placeholders for more wonderful truths. It was once proposed that storks “wintered on the moon”; we couldn’t have imagined that a mere two centuries later their wings would reveal the key to human fight. No Roman naturalist or German scholastic would have dared suggest swifts fly the equivalent of five times round the Earth every year. The US Navy models underwater missiles on the body shape of bluefin tuna. But biotech is yet to emulate the properties of the golden orb spider’s web, which can last years. The trunks are a mix of the upper lip and nose that contains 40k muscles - human bodies in their entirety only have about 650. 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.

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. The Book of Hopes: Words and Pictures to Comfort, Inspire and Entertain edited by Katherine RundellIridescence turns up in many insects, some birds, the odd squid: but in only one mammal, the golden mole. […] The golden mole is not, in fact, a mole. It’s more closely related to the elephant.“ The anatomical facts of this little guy are ASTONISHING and I had no idea it even existed. My main quarrel with this book is all the FILLER. I was expecting facts, anecdotes, and climate change forecasting about the featured animals, but most of the sections were historical misinformation (all the wrong things people used to think about animals), painful over-explaining of where the animals are mentioned in fiction, and incredibly dry, tangential human history. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.