Rocco and Maureen recommend …

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (2007) by Richard Preston.

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens.

Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air.

Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored. …

Amazon

It’s a fantastic read. Or ‘listen’ as it’s available on Audio.

Click PLAY or watch it on TED – Richard Preston on the giant trees

related VIDEO – Clip of the Winner of the International Forest Film Festival – Climbing Redwood Giants

Meh.

Speaker for the Dead (1986) is a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card and an indirect sequel to the novel Ender’s Game. …

Like Ender’s Game, the book won the Nebula Award in 1986, and the Hugo Award in 1987, making Card the first author to win both these awards in two consecutive years. …

Some fascinating concepts, but overall I found it too slow and philosophical to hold my interest. I won’t continue with the series.

Ender’s Game is a masterpiece, though.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours listening to all the books in the Dune franchise. Perhaps 16 novels (I lost count) … most read by Scott Brick.

It’s certainly the greatest plot I’ve ever known: the Butlerian Jihad (war against the machines), CHOAM, the spice melange, the Spacing Guild, the Navigators, Bene Gesserit, Missionaria Protectiva, the Imperial Sardaukar, the misnamed Holtzman effect for faster than light travel, Mentats, Kwisatz Haderach,

A great plot needs a great conclusion. I actually liked the ending in Sandworms of Dune though it was criticized as relying ..

… on at least four consecutive deus ex machina bailouts …

When Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson took over, filling in details, their plot additions were equally good.

The best character in their books (as opposed to Brian’s father): Erasmus

But Herbert and Anderson are too wordy. Too repetitive. They needed a more ruthless editor.

Bryson is one of my favourite authors. His latest book – At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010) – just might be his best, yet.

From one review:

… At Home has a fairly simple structure. Bryson will wander around the Norfolk rectory where he lives and discover how each of the rooms came to have the purpose and contents that it does. He’ll also concentrate largely “on the events of the last 150 years” and be “painfully selective”.

But as it turns out, this manifesto goes by the board even quicker than most. Two chapters later we’ve had spectacular set pieces on the construction of the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition. We’ve been told how assorted 18th and 19th-century clergymen invented the submarine, bred the first Jack Russell, wrote a history of dirty jokes and published the first scientific work on dinosaurs.

We’ve learnt that almost all of our food is Stone Age in origin and that the end of nomadism “happened all over the Earth, among people who could have no idea that others in distant places were doing precisely the same thing”. (“Dogs, for instance”, runs the typically striking paragraph-punchline, “were domesticated at much the same time in places as far apart as England, Siberia and North America.”)

… read more by James Walton on The Telegraph

Amazon – At Home: A short history of private life

Everyone will love this book.