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Greg Hackett - Editorial Expert
An avid crime and thriller reader when younger Greg is now more interested in non-fiction and in particular books which explain the natural world and our relationship with it. You will also find the biographies of extraordinary people propping up his reading list which is unsurprising as his career has mostly been in live events where he has had the opportunity to hear many remarkable human stories in person. Most recently Greg has founded the London Mountain Film Festival which shares the inspiring experiences of remarkable people doing amazing things in incredible places. He is also a publisher of gifts for hill-walkers and an enthusiastic but challenged home-brewer.
Martyn Ashton’s life took a dramatic turn when a spinal injury during a stunt left him paralysed from the waist down, right at the height of his career. In a single moment, everything he had worked for literally snapped. However, Joyride is not a story about loss, but one of remarkable transformation and triumph in the face of adversity.
At the heart of the book lies that pivotal moment of his injury, a life-changing event that could have easily broken him. But what makes Martyn’s story so compelling is his response. In Joyride, he typically downplays ... View Full Review
John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World is a gripping account of the 2016 wildfire that ravaged Fort McMurray, Alberta, forcing the evacuation of 90,000 people. The cover notes inform that Vaillant is a cinematic writer, and they aren’t kidding. At times this reads like the script for a disaster movie, as we become acquainted with a place and its characters, knowing all the time that a monster is out there in the woods and it’s heading this way. The fact that the city is built on the riches of our petrochemical ... View Full Review
Over the past few decades the experience of visiting bothies (mostly abandoned farm buildings in remote Scottish areas maintained as shelters for walkers) has gone from an underground, almost cultish activity, to one which is more publicly known and shared by people with a wider variety of reasons to be there. Kat Hill’s Bothy is an exploration of this, offering a heady blend of history, nature writing, and personal reflection.
Hill, a historian with a PhD from the University of Oxford, brings a dose of academic rigour to the world of bothy literature which has previously been more ... View Full Review
If anyone else had written a book about exploring the area around where they live it may not have landed quite as well as this one by Alastair Humphreys, who has cycled around the world, rowed the Atlantic and undertaken all manner of further adventures, macro and micro in his search for... what exactly? In Local, he gets to the bottom of it, because here on his home patch he unlocks countless stories of nature, history, the marvels of the universe, you name it and more besides, and you wonder in the end why he bothered going anywhere! But of ... View Full Review
Sometimes science will make discoveries that change the world, but sometimes it is just about how we look at those big leaps forward. In his latest landmark work, The Genetic Book of the Dead, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins holds Darwinism to the light and reveals the potential of natural selection to not only explain how creatures look and behave the way that they do in order to survive in their environments, but also to explain past environments, distant kingdoms, and use anatomy and cellular biology to explain these unseen landscapes.
Every book marks a moment in time, when all within ... View Full Review
A travel book in which someone walks the length of Spain is something of a niche within a niche within a niche. Mark Eveleigh’s colourful and eventful 1200km trip from Gibraltar in the south to Galicia in the north is a worn shoe-in for the travel section, but inside that genre it has a place in walking books, and from there it is nudging up against literature for the adventure market. Vagabond earns a place on all these shelves, but it does beg the question, How many people will read this in planning to walk the length of ... View Full Review
Finding Your Feet is the Why? How? And Where? of Rhiane Fatinikun’s journey to fulfilment, and her gift to people like her who have been marginalised and othered by the world of adventure. As a middle-aged white man quite active in this space I qualify for what Rhiane at one point termed the ‘Beige Pants Brigade’ and here I am sat in them reading her book. It’s an inspiring story. What started out as a shout out to other Black women to meet for a walk, became a movement which drew thousands of followers, ... View Full Review
Ned Boulting’s Tour de France commentary is an institution for fans of the race and when Covid disrupted his annual gig, like many of us, he was vulnerable to any distraction from lockdown madness. In his case that came in the form of a two minute reel of Pathé news footage covering his beloved race at some point around one hundred years ago. On a tip-off he picked it up at an auction. He had no idea what he was buying, and certainly not where it would take him.
In the pages of 1923, Ned goes on a ... View Full Review
Anyone who has climbed Scotland’s highest peak, Ben Nevis, will have come across a ruin at the top of it. This old weather station is where Alistair Moffat chooses to begin this enormous journey through the geographical and cultural history of Scotland. It’s an appropriate spot, since climate has been such a defining factor in the shaping of this land. No where else in Great Britain has glacial activity so influenced the future, carving out great lochs and valleys, providing grand natural partitions between settlements in which clans grew and saints and outlaws roamed.
The Highlands ... View Full Review
The opening chapter of The Heart of the Woods follows a father, son and grandson as they plant woodland on the border between Wales and England. The middle member of that family group is Wyl Menmuir who poignantly writes about their efforts to restore what was once there, and that which has so shaped our lives, our culture, our tools and even the ornaments in our homes. He describes how the ancient wildwood which covered so much of these islands is almost entirely gone, replaced by a patchwork of fields bordered by stone and hedgerow, but there are still woods ... View Full Review
There is no doubt that war, despite its terrible consequences, is a source of great pride and nostalgia for those who survived it, but particularly those who served within it with such heroism. Ken Aedy was only 20 when the war ended but by then he had already flown Lancasters with Bomber Command and also assisted with humanitarian airlifts as action was winding up. He was a hero, although his son Mark who wrote the introduction to this book instead describes his father as an ordinary man who lived through an extraordinary time. But 57,000 of the 125,000 aircrew who served alongside Ken ... View Full Review
A foreign correspondent for over two decades, Michael Peel has had plenty of time to reflect on how Britain's belief in its own myths, supposed core values and wartime nostalgia has guided it through the best and worst of times. But is it real? Of course belief can be one person's reality but to others it can appear fake and flimsy. In What Everyone Knows About Britain, Peel squints at our country's self image and finds comparisons across the globe.
The results make for fascinating reading, and the British caricature is essentially debunked. This is unquestionably a political book, particularly ... View Full Review
