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Books Related to Fauna Britannica Stefan T. Buczacki - ISBN: 0600613925
Dismal - Rated
I had the misfortune to be given this book as a present by a well-meaning relative in the very late 1990s. It rapidly made its way to the charity shop and the "yours for only a fiver" special offers in cheap book stores. It is best given to children who need pictures to cut up for a school project.
It's very rare that I condemn a book so severely, but this is truly awful. I don't remember HRH Prince of Wales taking a prominent role in the edition I was given - he only wrote the forward and Buczacki is the author. HRH's prominence now suggests that he's been pushed up the scale to give it some credibility (I assume that HRH does have some credibility in some circles?).
What dismayed me about the book was its dismal lack of depth and decent research. I turned first to badgers - in which I take an interest - and was appalled to see that the most recent reference to them came from 1983 or thereabouts. It completely failed to comment on the fact that the Government was killing them in a mass culling experiment at the time the book was published or on the vast range of additional research on them that had been published since '83.
From that and a number of other shallow species portraits, I concluded that the author had cobbled this together from whatever sat on his bookshelf at the time, regardless of how out-of-date it was. I got no sense that Buczacki had carefully researched each species.
It is hardly surprising - I got the sense that this and the equally dreadful Fauna Britannica by Duff Hart-Davies, published at the same time - was a cheap and rushed attempt to cash in on the runaway success of Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica (an incomparable piece of original research that has now been enhanced by the equally impressive Birds Britannica, which Mabey wrote with Mark Cocker).
Both Birds and Flora Britannica took the trouble to invite the populace to submit their knowledge about birds and plants, and both books are referenced accordingly and with respect, making them a rich resource for cultural historians as well as curious naturalists.
Fauna Britannica does no such thing. Oliver Rackham, the great rural scholar who pours scorn on those who make reference to older works without first assessing their veracity, would loathe this cheap re-hash of rural myth and speculation which will forever be in the shadow of Flora and Birds Britannica. Don't buy it.
