Day: February 18, 2018

To the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon
by Alan Tennant

After reading Peregrine Spring, I looked among my own shelves for some more falconry-related titles. I thought this one looked promising, in fact I had two copies of it among my unread-books, one picked up at a library sale and the other from The Book Thing. I guess it caught my eye twice for the same reason. It\’s written by a man who sometime in the eighties or nineties (my best guess) became suddenly gripped by the idea of following an individual peregrine falcon on its migration jouney- not just mapping its path on a screen via radio-tracking, but physically trailing it in a light aircraft. It sounds intriguing, especially for the time when little was known about peregrines, their exact routes and how juveniles fared on their first migration. But something about the book didn\’t quite work for me. The way the author apparently appropriated others\’ equipment for his un-sanctioned study kind of put me off. I thought the descriptions of flight in a small plane -akin to Saint-Exuprey\’s writing- would interest me, but it didn\’t. And actual descriptions of the birds are few and far between. They did learn some new things about how peregrines respond to certain weather patterns and their hunting styles, and there are some good observations from nesting sites in the arctic. Unfortunately most of the book seems to be about the travels, difficulties getting around regulations, encounters with loads of strangers, and effects of man on the environment -noticeable from the air- where the writing style just did not engage me. I found myself skipping around a lot to read the parts that actually described the peregrines. I probably missed a lot in the process and this is one case where I\’m rather disappointed in myself for not appreciating a book properly.

Rating: 2/5          304 pages, 2004

A Calvin and Hobbes Collection
by Bill Watterson

I lingered over this one because it\’s the last of my Calvin and Hobbes books until I find a few more volumes. More nostalgic stuff of childhood: decoding secret messages, imagining grand schemes. First half is a lot of christmas glory and social commentary (or criticism of his parents) presented in snowman artwork. Calvin\’s dad shows himself to be an avid cyclist and takes the family camping- which both Calvin and his mom resent. The kid for his part gets regular thrills careening down slopes on a sled in winter, in a red wagon during the warm months. I cracked a smile at how Susie the girl-next-door calmly thwarts his plans to clobber her with snowballs, water balloons or some other kind of ambush. Their attempts to \”play house\” together, shown in a different comic art style, are hilarious. The larger horizontal format does make this book awkward to handle in softcover and I don\’t know if it adds much to appreciating the artwork as there are rather wide page margins.

Rating: 3/5         175 pages, 1994

A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury 
by Bill Watterson

I thoroughly enjoyed reading more Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin speculates on the realities of Santa Claus, makes terrible faces for family photos, resists bathtime, fights the babysitter, teases the girl next door mercilessly, procrastinates doing homework, imagines he\’s saving the world from distasters with superpowers, or rampaging around as a dinosaur, and argues with his more level-headed best friend tiger Hobbes. I laughed through many pages. I had forgotten the episode where the family\’s house got broken into. In this volume he starts his club against \”slimy girls\” and makes his cardboard-box duplicator. Yeah, second half of the book was suddenly a repeat-read for me that I skipped over: it\’s the entire contents of Scientific Progress Goes \”Boink\”. With the improvement that this volume has all the weekend strips in full color. So now I know which one is immediately getting weeded from my collection as a redundancy.

Rating: 3/5         255 pages, 1992

DISCLAIMER:

All books reviewed on this site are owned by me, or borrowed from the public library. Exceptions are a very occasional review copy sent to me by a publisher or author, as noted. Receiving a book does not influence my opinion or evaluation of it

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