I asked for three books for Christmas. The first two, Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I read over the Christmas break in front of the blazing fire in my parents’ house. The third, A Complete Guide to Arctic Wildlife by Richard Sale, is more suited to years of browsing than a read through, though I have already found out the difference between a mountain hare and an Arctic hare, something which was bothering me a lot a while back when I was writing for BBC Wildlife about some kind of white bunny with black-tipped ears I’d seen in Siberia – but which? (Answer: it was a mountain hare because there are no Arctic hares in Chukotka. And that is what I wrote. Phew.)

Last Chance to See

This isn’t a new book – poignantly apparent from the fact that at least one of the species covered, the Yangtze river dolphin, is already reckoned to be extinct (as, very sadly, is Douglas Adams himself: he died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of 49, in 2001). Last Chance to See has nothing to do with the intergalactic travel stories for which Adams is most famous. Instead, this is a story based very much on Planet Earth – it tells of a number of journeys made by Adams and zoologist, writer and photographer Mark Carwardine in the 1980s in search of endangered species. They go to Indonesia to see Komodo dragons, to Zaire to find northern white rhinoceroses (which, interestingly enough, are so named not for their colour – they are dark grey – but through a mistranslation of the Afrikaans word weit, which means wide, and refers to the rhino’s mouth). They travel to New Zealand in search of kakapos, and find Mauritius kestrels in, yes, Mauritius.
    Adams positions himself very much as the neophyte naturalist. His style is self-deprecating and often funny – this is a book as much about the dreadful travails of travel in some of the world’s dingy and dusty corners as about the rare creatures encountered. But while you chortle merrily enough as you read of the duo’s discomforts, it’s the humbling moments of wildlife encounter that stay with you after you’ve turned the last page – the horror Adams feels at the circus-act treatment of the Komodo dragons and the bleating goat that is fed to them; his attempt to describe the enchantment and uncanny familiarity of a close meeting with a gorilla. It’s a delightfully funny book about a not very funny subject. The pages fly by – but they make their point.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet Classics)
I’d read this book before, but ages ago. Then, when I was in Siberia last spring, we visited the remains of a gulag: even as it stood in ruins, it was one of the most dispiriting places I had ever spent 10 minutes. Apparently the first 3,000 gulag prisoners were sent to Chukotka, the area I visited, in 1946 and half were dead within a year. A deep misery seemed to infect the air, and I could imagine that, if one were sentenced to 10 or 20 years in such a place, one’s all-pervading thought must have been to escape the eye of the guards for long enough to kill oneself.
    Having been to this gulag I was keen to re-read One Day but as I had no idea where my old copy could be I asked Father Christmas for another one. It didn’t hit me quite as hard as my first reading of it many years ago. I suppose that was the first I’d ever heard of gulags, and the horror was fresh. But still, the minutae bite. There's the captain who, unable to accept his diminishment, is carted off to the freezing camp jail for 10 days for arguing with the guard. The narrator rather blithely relates that this means tuberculosis and ruined health for life, while 15 days in 'the hole' would result in a ‘wooden overcoat’. There are the Baptists sentenced to 25 years simply on account of their faith, who study their bibles and rejoice in their suffering. Above all, though, it was the warm humanity of this book that struck me on the second reading – the small kindnesses, friendships and values that build up in such a place. As I read, I kept finding myself trying to superimpose the characters and events in the book on those buildings I had visited in the Siberian winter. And my conclusion was that, even given a few small kindnesses, I would never have found the strength to survive.

A Complete Guide to Arctic Wildlife
I’m no zoologist. In fact, I was very surprised when leafing through this book to find out what a lemming looked like. However, I do find myself writing about wildlife sometimes, given that birds and bears and things are a major feature of some of the destinations that I visit. And slowly, I’m trying to raise my game in the nature department.
    This book will be a big help. It’s a weighty tome – it’s definitely not a field guide to actually lug around the field, but rather a book to refer to at home. It’s a lot more comprehensive and detailed than any of the other Arctic wildlife guides that I’ve seen, and it’s beautiful as well, with fabulous full-colour photography and maps throughout. The first 50 pages are dedicated to meaty info on the Arctic – geology, climate, human history, and so on. It’s not a light read, but it is interesting. For example, Sale explains why snowflakes are shaped the way they are, and what causes their symmetry; he also writes a small thesis on icebergs (Arctic icebergs are smaller than those of Antarctica, and ‘pleasingly misshapen’.) The remaining 400 or so pages are dedicated to the creatures of the far north from skuas to sandpipers, sea lions and stoats. So long as the house doesn't burn down, I'll be reading this book for decades.