24 April 2013

Book Review: The Private Life of Plants

This book accompanies the series of the same name, however, you do not need to have watched the series to enjoy the book. David Attenborough writes such vivid descriptions of the behaviour of plants and his experiences of finding them, that you feel like you're there discovering these things for yourself.

The book is chaptered into segments to align with the television series, which makes sense because these divisions look at very different aspects of plants. To support the text are marvellous photographs. So wonderful are these photographs that I could quite easily mention some recently published books that should have looked to this book for guidance. Some photographs, including the frontispiece, are taken by Sir David, and match the quality of the other photographs throughout the book.

As is mentioned in the introduction and acknowledgments, this is a book of the popular genre and not a scientific text. Therefore the book is written, largely, without scientific terminology and indeed, benefits from this. The book first published in 1995, should now be showing its age. In some parts of the book, this is true as advancements of plants scientists have been vast in the past couple of decades. Luckily as the book primarily documents the behaviour and not the science behind this, the book is still a very good read and the examples used are still, in fact, used today in various television series and books that cover botany.

My investigations into plants only begun at the beginning of 2012 and I purchased this book from a charity shop around a year ago. I purposely let it stand in the bookcase while I tried to get my level of knowledge up to really appreciate this book and to see what advancements there had been between 1995 and 2013. The book certainly doesn't require this and can be seen as a book for people wanting an introduction to the topic of plant, but not wanting to be overwhelmed by this vast topic.



Own or Loan:          Loan
Read Again:           Yes
Recommend:          Yes
Overall out of Five: 4

No comments:

Post a Comment

I really enjoy reading and replying to your comments, but please do not use this space for advertising!