Lowdown on animal tracking and diseases

In this week’s selection, a writer warns of how ecological damage exacerbates zoonoses, top field guides help you identify spoor in the wild, and a historian looks at what made the West. By Patricia McCracken.

Fevered Planet by John Vidal (Bloomsbury, R495)

The chaos, anger and heartbreak that was COVID-19 is still so close that every year we mark the breaking news of the early cases and the shock of the first lockdowns. The former environment editor for the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Vidal, does a roundup of zootic diseases, past, present and to come. Farmers are already familiar with some of them, and the imperative to stop them being passed into the human population – think brucellosis and listeria. But Vidal is reaching past these: there are many more that our science hasn’t recognised or that haven’t yet evolved but could with ecosystems’ wholescale disruption when forests are felled or land dammed, plus the world’s ongoing push towards urbanisation. Vidal gallops you through risks in more than 100 countries – perhaps not the holiday travel you were anticipating but a stimulating read reminding us to take a holistic view of living in our world.

Tracker Manual by Alex van den Heever, Renias Mhlongo, Karel Benadie & Ian Thomas (Struik Nature, R450)

When this field guide first came out in 2017, it deservedly became a top seller – practical, clear to use and with advice from three of the Tracker Academy’s top people plus filed guide Thomas. Now thanks to this second, fully revised updated edition, you can renew your worn copy or recommend it to friends. All the spoor drawings have been renewed, 200 of the photographs are new and a further 35 species have been included. It usefully covers small mammals such as hares, rodents, amphibians, reptiles, birds and insects in one volume with the more expected larger mammals. It’s something of a textbook, so contains good sections on best tracking practice for best results and hints such as what diffuse thinking is and when to use it to escape a tracking dead end. For those who want to get to grips with tracking, this is the equivalent of a rich Easter egg to binge on over the holiday.

How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History by Josephine Quinn (Bloomsbury, R475)

The West is racked with selfdoubt; at least in intellectual circles. This has resulted in an old publishing practice being reinvented: the mammoth, multi-thousand-year history of Europe book. Fifty years ago, this was something used to bore first-year history students. These days, fortunately, the maps and photographs are a great improvement on those 1960s works. But there is another change: this kind of history blockbuster has returned as a vehicle of enlightenment and revision. In Quinn’s case, she’s packed 562 pages with information illustrating that Europe’s history was greatly influenced from outside; in other words, by contact with and impact from other civilisations rather than developing in isolation. All this is true enough and well argued. Despite the hype, however, this is still not an entirely new concept so does have a whiff of a fairly recent distillation in old bottles.

The Best Revenge by Gerald Seymour (Hodder & Stoughton, R415)

Jonas Merrick is a penpusher in MI5 who prefers to keep his head down and make it to his retirement and full pension. In reality, he’s idealistic about saving some of the world’s little people who stand in the sights of great powers, such as Russia, China and maybe even his own bosses. Merrick’s been almost fired a few times but his ingenious ways of bringing down the enemy have been reluctantly recognised. He’s been allocated a cupboard of an office where he surreptitiously pulls various strings and cunningly interweaves them. Seymour’s plot sweeps from the Mongolian steppes to a London commuter town, and from the Thames to Russian penal colony and embassies and ministries. One faction of characters has distinctly antisocial ideas about how revenge should be served and how cold, but nothing is too unexpected for a thriller in which a support actor is a Norwegian forest cat.