Serendipities Of A Nomad's Life

Book review – classic whodunnit on a sailboat The classic detective story – of Agatha Christies or Dorothy L Sayers for example – very often take place among a group of people who know one another and who are isolated in some manner – the country house, the small island hotel, the steamer (Murder on [...]

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Book review:  All at sea in James Patterson’s thriller “Sail”. Writing any book – whether non-fiction or a novel or other forms of fiction – takes a lot of time and effort. And any book takes some effort on the part of the reader first to obtain and secodly, to read.  So one might imagine [...]

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You don’t have to be a sailor to admire the extraordinary accomplishments of Sir Ernest Shackleton. His example as a leader is outstanding and the story of how he brought back alive all 27 members of his expedition after their ship was crushed by the ice and sank in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica can [...]

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Next time you’re having a hard day, the world is dumping on you and you need some inspiration to get yourself moving again, read Sir Ernest Shackleton’s account of his “failed” expedition to Antarctica.  I keep a copy of his book “South” on “Kuan Yin” for just such occasions when  I need to grit my [...]

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How would you respond if a major oil spill contaminated miles of your favourite landscape or seascape, and destroyed wildlife and the livelihoods of local people? What would be your reaction is your wife,  partner or someone you loved was so enraged by the negligence of the corporation and the useless blather of politicians that he [...]

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The seas were teeming with wildlife – fish, birds, seals, whales – when Europeans first arrived off the eastern seaboard of North America. Yet within a few generations, that wealth of life had been destroyed, species that once were counted in hundreds of millions are extinct, and the whole biosphere of life degraded to the [...]

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What Science Has to Say About Our Stuff and Happiness   Even as we rush to the mall with our credit cards, we’re likely to be repeating to ourselves and telling other people that we know “stuff” does not make us happy.   Yet our governments still measure citizens’ well-being in terms of economic output [...]

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Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. first published in 1996. Years ago a newspaper reporter asked my mother, “Are you not afraid when you’re son goes off into the Amazon wilderness alone in his canoe that something might happen to him and that you’ll never see him again?” My mother gave what I have always [...]

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I’ve read or perused quite a few “doom and gloom” books over the last couple of years.  Almost all of them follow the same outline; first the doom, then the gloom and then everlasting hope – how our world will not end tomorrow if we take small steps today. It might be called “doom porn’ [...]

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Isn’t it amazing that for all the millions of words and thousands of books written (including two of mine) about the Amazon rain forest, that almost none have been fiction.  Novels about the greatest rain forest on the plant are rare.  Even short stories and novellas are hard to find. And poems are rarer still. [...]

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