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Kew
Kew
Oct 6, 2024 3:18 PM

Author:Ray Desmond

Kew

This informative volume traces the extraordinary evolution over more than two centuries of Kew's historic landscape, which began with two private royal gardens and expanded through the work of some of our most distinguished garden designers and architects, resulting in an important range of listed buildings of which thirty-nine have survived. These, together with the latest additions to Kew's architectural heritage, are extensively illustrated and described. As much part of this fascinating landscape are the principal figures in Kew's history - among them Queen Caroline, her son Frederick Prince of Wales, his wife Princess Augusta, and George III; Sir Joseph Banks, who organized the first worldwide plant-collecting expeditions; Sir William Hooker and his son, Sir Joseph, who laid the foundations of the present Botanic Gardens; and successive directors who formulated policy and enabled improvements.

Kew also played a pivotal role in the development of the British Empire's natural resources, the introduction of commercial crops to the colonies and the compilation of colonial floras. Its collaboration with overseas botanical gardens, alongside its establishment as an international scientific institution are equally crucial and examined in detail. Whilst previous accounts of Kew have relied almost entirely on printed sources, the present volume makes extensive use of archives which support modern Kew's primary objective: "the better management of the Earth's environment by increasing knowledge and understanding of the plant kingdom".

Reviews

A truly engaging book on the extraordinary world of flowers into which the writer takes us with wry wit and fearsome knowledge... Fascinating stuff, and will ensure you never look at your garden in the same way again.

—— Sunday Times

'The amazing story of how plants evolved, hoe they survive and how they heal... a wonderful tale written simply but elegantly and with a true scientist's clarity. The gardeners of this world will find it wonderful armchair reading'

—— Publishing News

'This book is a treasure-trove of information that aims to prevent flowers being sidelined as purely decorative features in our gardens, and reminds us that they are vital and hardworking objects of wonder. We uncover their secret lives: the dirty tricks they play, their sex-lives, and their ability to heal. Despite the use of some excessively flowery prose, this is a fascinating book that will defy you to walk unthinkingly past a summer meadow or a florist's window again.'

—— Daily Mail

…the effect of this book is to make us look anew at our gardens or rush out and buy a bunch of flowers

—— Ruth Rendell , Times

It is a wonderful tale written simply but elegantly and with a true scientist’s clarity. The gardeners of this world will find it wonderful armchair reading

—— Publishing News

Richly lyrical and deeply confessional… a triumph of rhapsodic writing that can lift the heart.

—— Radio Times

A magical portrait

—— Lemn Sissay , BBC R4 Midweek

Extraordinarily vivid and utterly unique…surely destined to be some of the most talked-about nature writing of the year

—— BBC Countryfile Magazine

Astonishing… brilliantly written

—— Craig McLean , Radio Times

Fierce, disturbing and surprising

—— Sunday Times

This is a raw, strange, mesmerising book; an impressionistic take on Packham’s life and the natural world that transformed it.

—— Express

Sets out with enviable (and alarming) lucidity the massive challenges now facing our species as genetic technologies, AI and robotics alter forever our relationships with one another and with other species. It’s even more readable, even more important, than his excellent Sapiens.

—— Kazuo Ishiguro , Guardian Books of the Year

I think the mark of a great book is that it not only alters the way you see the world after you've read it, it also casts the past in a different light. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari shows us where mankind is headed in an absolutely clear-sighted & accessible manner. I don't normally ask for autographs but I got a bit starstruck & asked him to sign my copy of his book after we'd had a conversation for my show on BBC 6Music. His inscription reads: 'The future is in your hands' - a good thing to remember when such great changes are afoot.

—— Jarvis Cocker , Mail on Sunday

Spellbinding… This is a very intelligent book, full of sharp insights and mordant wit... It is a quirky and cool book, with a sliver of ice at its heart... It is hard to imagine anyone could read this book without getting an occasional, vertiginous thrill.

—— David Runciman , Guardian

Like all great epics, Sapiens demanded a sequel. Homo Deus, in which that likely apocalyptic future is imagined in spooling detail, is that book. It is a highly seductive scenario planner for the numerous ways in which we might overreach ourselves.

—— Tim Adams , Observer

Homo Deus is a sweeping, apocalyptic history of the human race, which reads more like a TED-talk on acid.

—— Norman Lewis , Spiked

Harari is an intellectual magpie who has plucked theories and data from many disciplines - including philosophy, theology, computer science and biology - to produce a brilliantly original, thought-provoking and important study of where mankind is heading.

—— Saul David , Evening Standard

Like its predecessor, which sold in its millions, Homo Deus will have a world audience. Taking over where Sapiens left off, it looks forward to where history, ethics and gargantuan biotech investment might lead us - to the end, Harari thinks, of death, suffering and the very idea of being human.

—— James McConnachie , Sunday Times Culture

A remarkable book, full of insights and thoughtful reinterpretations of what we thought we knew about ourselves and our history... One measure of Harari’s achievement is that one has to look a long way back – to 1934, in fact, the year when Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization was published – for a book with comparable ambition and scope.

—— John Naughton , Guardian

Harari is an exceptional writer, who seems to have been specially chosen by the muses as a conduit for the zeitgeist… Fascinating reading.

—— Stephen Cave , Times Literary Supplement

This provocative book analyses our present state – and makes startling predictions about the future.

—— Mail on Sunday

Sapiens was a paean to humanity’s powers of collective imagination…with darker notes on how these mega-stories might direct our new, transformative, information and biological technologies. “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?” was Harari’s closing line. Homo Deus tries to answer that question, with all the pedagogic and encyclopaedic brilliance of its predecessor.

—— New Scientist

An often thought-provoking and always elegantly written book.

—— Steven Poole , Spectator

Brilliant, mind-expanding…explores where Homo Sapiens might go from here, via his signature blend of science, history, philosophy and every discipline in between.

—— Bookseller

His reasoning is laid out with a lucidity that makes it a joy to read.

—— UK Press Syndication

Yuval Noah Harari is the most entertaining and thought-provoking writer of non-fiction at the moment. In Homo Deus he covers broad terrain, touching on everything from Zen Buddhism to the Second World War to how bats read the frequency of echoes, to explore the largest most difficult and sometimes frightening subject of all: our own future. As with Sapiens you finish the book feeling much wiser, but not having noticed any hard work along the way. I loved this book.

—— Matt Haig

Sapiens showed us where we came from. Homo Deus shows us where we’re going

—— Eastern Daily Press

Challenging, readable and thought-provoking… He has provided a smart look at what may be ahead for humanity.

—— Time

Exhilarating.

—— Nick Curtis , Evening Standard

Original, compelling, and provocative.

—— Gary Ogden , Shortlist
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