Customer Reviews:
 An excellent life - by an excellent biographer - perfect reading. February 12, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I idly picked this book up to browse, after reading Elspeth Huxley's "The Flame Trees of Thika" and "The Mottled Lizard", as I know she is incapable of writing a dull sentence. I was then oblivious to all else until I had read the whole book. Peter Scott, being the son of a world famous explorer, had a hard act to follow, and his inclinations were probably guided by his father writing to his mother "try and make the boy interested in natural history". But he excelled in so many areas and his interests were wide-ranging. He fought a brave and exciting war, trusted and looked up to by the men under his command. He confesses that he shot and slaughtered thousands of game birds before turning to conservation. He could have been an olympic ice skater....but turned his energies to art, becoming a painter which he used to support himself while establishing his much visited wildfowl and wetland trusts. Eager to try everything and travel everywhere, he was an avid and curious deep sea diver. He seems to have met everyone and certainly at the end he was a figure everyone wanted to meet. I found the photographs in my edition very useful and interesting to "put a face to a name". Twice married, it is hard to believe he packed so much into his varied and admirable life.
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