ARMCHAIR NATURE SAFARI

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33941, 6 September 1975, Page 10

ARMCHAIR NATURE SAFARI

The Good Earth. Edited by Les Line. Macmillan, London, 1974. 256 pp. N.Z. price $l5. The American Audobon Society, like its better known counterpart, the Sierra Club, is a voluntary organisation which has outgrown its original purposes to become concerned with general problems of conservation and the preservation of scenery and the natural environment. Both organisations have taken it on themselves to attempt to spread appreciation of all aspects of the natural world among the general public.

Only two of the articles in “The Good Earth” are specifically concerned with birds — the original interest of the members of the Audobon Society. The society has not lost sight of its original concern, but it has clearly expanded its viewpoint. The articles collected in this volume appeared originally in the magazine of the Audobon Society. They deal with a wide variety of animal, plant and marine life, scenic forms and natural phenomena. The subjects are confined, geographically, to the Americas, This

confinement, clearly, does not limit the range of interests covered. NewZealand readers with intensely practical interest in the outdoors mayfind some of the topics covered too remote from what can be seen in NewZealand to w-arrant the expense of buying the book. For all others, the book has all the delights that one can expect from an armchair “nature safari” to strange parts.

Inevitably the book invites comparison with the similarly lavish publications of the Sierra Club. The standards of publication are equally high. The most noticeable difference is that this book, being a collection of magazine articles has no single theme or concern with a single area. Its diversity is just as appealing as the concentration of Sierra Club publications on one particular area, species or phenomenon

Al! the photographs are excellent and all are well-reproduced. It is a coffee table book, in the best sense of the phrase — the sort of book to leave lying round because its pictures are a delight to browse through and its self-contained articles require only 10 or 15 minutes to read.