Sounds Wild and Broken

David George Haskell

‘There should be a shrine here,’ Haskell writes of a spot by the

Camino de Santiago in

France, ‘a monument to honor the first known earthly voice.’ That sound belonged to an ancient cricket, the newly evolved raspy ridges on its wing fossilised in the rock. Haskell is a scientist who writes like a poet, and here he shares his joy in the sounds of the world and their curious evolution, while showing how humans are silencing or smothering the sounds of other species. It will make you listen; make you think. £20, faber.co.uk