Customer Reviews:
 my absolute favourite book October 28, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The first time I read this book, it jumped into my list of top five best books ever read. By the third time it was at number one.
The whole thing is lyrical, mesmerising and full of a strong sense of drama. All Baker does is go out and watch the peregrines. The birds exhibit normal bird behaviour: they fly, they hunt, they feed, they rest. Baker's prose infuses this daily ritual with a constant breathless beauty, and it sticks in your mind for ages after you've finished the book. He describes a nightjar's call as "a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask"; an owl's face as "grotesque, as though some lost and shrunken knight had withered to an owl"; the winter, when it arrives, as so cold that "Layers of ice seemed to shatter across my frozen face." Every single sentence in the book is beautiful and deeply affecting. It completely transcends category--it belongs in every library. I only wish there were an audio version so I could listen to it every day as well.
Superb, distinctive and unforgettable April 24, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I haven't ever reviewed anything on Amazon before but felt compelled to seeing that this astonishing book has not yet had one. The Peregrine, written by the reclusive librarian and naturalist J.A.Baker is a unique work, and certainly the best modern prose nature writing I have encountered. It should take its place beside Manley Hopkins notebooks and poems and the poetry of Les Murray and Ted Hughes. It is the last of these is that it most resembles with its intense distillations of natural violence, of planetary process seen in the local and nature seen without romantic overlay, functioning beyond human consciousness. The book consists of a short essay on the natural history of the peregrine falcon followed by an edited diary of days spent watching a few individuals over one winter and spring. There is therefore a repetition of days out watching, dawns and dusks, which becomes deeply hypnotic. Baker eschews any autobiographical writing; it is the inhuman drama of the birds lives that the reader becomes immersed in. He has a facility for metaphor every bit as good as Hughes' and, as in Hughes, the effect produced is of shockingly vivid arrest of the natural world. It is simply some of the best prose I have read.
In short, The Peregrine is unlike anything I have read before, a book that I will continue to live with and quite probably reread once a year. Do not delay before discovering this remarkable work.
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