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Crow Country

Author: Mark Cocker
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Category: Book

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Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

5 reviews
Sales Rank: 696

Media: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.9

ISBN: 0224076019
EAN: 9780224076012
ASIN: 0224076019

Publication Date: August 2, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new book dispatched from stock in the UK

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Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars

A very good book with one reservation. May 13, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

I echo what others have said about the quality of this book. It is indeed a good piece of writing and the only reservation I have - and it is somewhat tentative - is that there is perhaps too much about the writer and not enough about the crows and rooks. Put briefly, next time there could be more Corvids and less Cocker. As an aside I would say you learn as much if not more about rooks and crows in the late Roger Deakin's book, "Wildwood" (2007).

5 out of 5 stars

Yes, it really is that good! April 21, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

I'm not a bird watcher but as an outdoor person I've often been camping around ravens and crows. This book is absolutely fabulous, chronicling Mark Cocker's move to rural Norfolk and his growing fascination with ravens. There are some wonderfully evocative descriptions of landscape and locality. The technical investigation of the crows creeps up on you and you really do find yourself reading some detailed stuff about crows and being completely engrossed by it all.

A fabulous book.

5 out of 5 stars

Simply glorious February 29, 2008
17 out of 17 found this review helpful

Crow Country isn't just a profile of this very British bird, it's also a philosophy, a biography, an investigation and a wonderfully lyrical description of the British countryside. The subtitle "A meditation on birds, landscape and nature" is a perfect summary of this glorious slim volume: 192 pages of sheer joy. From the wonderful opening chapter where Mark Cocker almost literally paints with words the evening gathering of corvids in his local fields, I was totally wrapped up in this passionate and beautifully written book. The blurb describes this as a "prose poem". Too right. For me, this is one of the all-time great books on British natural history.

5 out of 5 stars

Something to crow about August 2, 2007
120 out of 124 found this review helpful

I was interested in birds once , even going as far as to spend my hard earned paper round money on a very expensive "Book Of British Birds"( which I still have, the book that is , not the paper round) , but then I became more interested in the flirtatious human kind and that was the end of that . So reading a book about the corvid family of birds -a family that includes crows, rooks, jackdaws , ravens, jays , choughs, magpies- wasn't the examination it might have been. It helps greatly that Mark Cocker strikes a vivid balance between his expert knowledge and accessibility.
Cocker is a committed naturalist, spending hours standing around in the flatlands near his Norfolk home waiting to catch glimpses of birds that many of us probably see , and take for granted every day of our lives. He admits this is bizarre but he is not just looking for individual birds or mating pairs but ostensibly for flocks .His writing about these masses of birds at dusk as they head off to roost is almost poetic and it's this literacy that also makes Crow Country such an enjoyable read. Entranced by a gathering of birds in the night sky Like "a gyroscope of tightly packed fish roiling and twisted by the tide" he surmises that their power over him is to "act like ink -blot tests drawing out of (his ) unconscious ".
Cocker then intersperses elements of autobiography and sociology into the narrative as he contrasts a birds migration with the human turmoil of moving house even going as far as to compare his recent upheaval from inner city Norwich to the Yare valley to a bird migration , driven by instinct- which will come as a surprise to Kirsty Allsop , a good thing I think.
This book though is not just set in Norfolk and is all the richer and more fascinating for it .Cocker travels from Dumfriesshire to the flat heartlands of South England observing or more pertinently sometimes failing to observe the birds in all their complexity . He also points out the symbiosis between the creatures and rooks, how crows form an integral part of British folk lore. Its persuasive , perspicacious and expressive, a deeply passionate exploration about how these birds "seemed to express as deep a homing instinct for our green and pleasant land as the English felt themselves" Or as it wonderfully observes how its raucous cry is "Our landscape made audible" .

5 out of 5 stars

A convocation of crows. August 1, 2007
77 out of 80 found this review helpful

This insight into the life of crows and the ways in which they have always impinged on human existence, is both fascinating and lyrical. The author betrays his affection for these intelligent birds on every page of this beautiful book.