Gods of the Morning: A Bird’s Eye View of a Highland Year by John Lister-Kaye
The gods of the morning, according to Virgil, are birds. They are regarded with reverence by naturalist and conservationist John Lister-Kaye, who has written his own Georgic in lyrical praise of the wildlife at Aigas, his field study centre near Inverness. He keeps a seasoned eye on the seasonal behaviour of birds, logging unusual variations in their migration and nesting patterns, and developing a wry sense of their character. Rooks, for instance, are “boisterous personalities, like inner-city youths: racketing, arguing, bossing, coming and going, flapping, cawing loudly”. In this ecological microcosm, the birds of Aigas are “thermometers of environmental health and change — not always a happy story”. There have been losses over recent decades — moorland waders, curlew, lapwing, greenshank, redshank and oystercatchers. Though Lister-Kaye warns of the damage caused by humankind, and sometimes strikes an elegiac note, he sings full-throatedly in praise of the struggle for survival and the persistence of nature.
Gods of the Morning: A Bird’s Eye View of a Highland Year by John Lister-Kaye, Canongate, 294pp, £14.99. To buy this book for £12.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Breaking the Silence: My Story of Discovery as I Heard for the Very First Time by Jo Milne
In March 2014, a cochlear implant enabled Jo Milne, profoundly deaf since birth and registered blind as an adult, to hear for the first time in the 40 years of her life. The pioneering surgical procedure caused a global media sensation, and now Jo travels the country as a mentor to other deaf-blind people who suffer from Usher syndrome. The transition from silence to sound would seem an absolute benefit, but Jo was undefended: she had to learn to process the noise she was hearing, to identify the sound of a phone ringing, the “clunk” of a cab door closing. The world, she discovered, is filled with sounds of distress, but there is also the sweet flood of music and the joy of birdsong at dawn. Now and again, it all becomes too much and Jo removes the cochlear implant. Movingly, she says now that “the silence I’d been so terrified of my entire life suddenly became a great comfort”. Her memoir of a life lived in light and darkness, silence and sound, is bright with her courage and humanity.
Breaking the Silence: My Story of Discovery as I Heard for the Very First Time by Jo Milne, Coronet, 262pp, £16.99. To buy this book for £14.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
I’ve Always Kept a Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy Denny by Mick Houghton
Mick Houghton is a fanboy for the folk-rock band Fairport Convention and its lead singer Sandy Denny. “Here,” he says, “was Britain’s answer to Jefferson Airplane, with a singer who was Grace Slick’s equal. No, Sandy Denny was better.” His biography is enthusiastic about Denny’s dynamic vocal range, dramatic genius as a singer-songwriter, and how she was a bridge between 1960s folk and pop and the sensitive singer-songwriters of the 1970s. But then there was her marriage to Australian singer Trevor Lucas, whose tensions Houghton compares with Plath and Hughes or Bogart and Bacall. Interviews with Denny’s friends and fellow musicians are revealing, though diverse. She was “manic”, says one; “manipulative”, another; and for sure she was deeply conflicted about her role as a mother and disdainful of pop success. Denny’s death at the age of 31 in 1978 is lamented by Houghton, whose well-researched, lively biography does her character full justice and proclaims her long-term legacy to modern music.
I’ve Always Kept a Unicorn: The Biography of Sandy Denny by Mick Houghton, Faber, 502pp, £20 . To buy this book for £18, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134