Fingers in the Sparkle Jar: A Memoir

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I absolutely admire what he's doing here, can't fault the book on integrity and original approach but the sentences are absolutely stuffed with adjectives, I just couldn't absorb it all. An introverted, unusual young boy, isolated by his obsessions and a loner at school, Chris Packham only felt at ease in the fields and woods around his suburban home.

It's had something of the opposite effect on me though, while I still bought the book I now don't think I could watch Chris Packham on TV. uk and we will contact you to make suitable arrangements to either refund the sale or replace the faulty goods. The deeply relatable memoir of a boy growing up on the edge of a nowhere town, not really grasping how people work and much happier wandering the half-wild edgelands or engrossed in his own worlds. Rarely does a book make you feel like you know the author personally by the end but this one really does. Bookbag also enjoyed A Sting in the Tale by Dave Goulson which will appeal to anyone with a passion for wildlife.The boy (nearly always a boy) who was the clever geek, no friends, rarely spoke, terrible at PE, hair, clothes and shoes always wrong, often badly bullied or ignored. As Paul’s remarks suggest (to me) the issue is now well and truly in the public domain and let’s keep that spotlight on it, we need to expose the true nature of the ‘sport’ which is practicised/indulged or however you wish to define it. What I especially enjoyed about this memoir was the feel of a kid growing up in the sixties and seventies. He is best known for the BAFTA-winning The Really Wild Show and fronting BBC's Springwatch and Autumnwatch. It flips between periods in his childhood, his teens when he had a pet kestrel and his meeting with a psychologist when he is in his forties.

Blend ‘A Kestrel for a Knave‘ with ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning‘ and then dim the lights to make it darker and that’s where this book takes you.I prefered the elements of social history, and also how he got from being an autisistic child to a successful naturalist and TV presenter. I got this book, as I expect many, or indeed most, of the others who own it did, because I'm a fan of Chris Packham. I did hear this book wasn’t an ordinary, chronological memoir, but even then I wasn’t prepared for the writing style in this. This memoir simply describes these segments and doesn’t add any kind of reflection to it, even though I wonder how Chris would now view this behaviour.

I wish there was more about the wildlife rather than random perspectives of other people on Chris and his actions. It's a stupid and facetious question, clearly nobody edited this book, it's a rank and steamy mess of adjectives and adverbs with no substance. In his rich, lyrical and emotionally exposing memoir, Chris brings to life his childhood in the 70s, from his bedroom bursting with fox skulls, birds' eggs and sweaty jam jars, to his feral adventures. I grew up watching him on THE REALLY WILD SHOW as a kid and continue to watch him on SPRINGWATCH as an adult.

Be they victorian glass vases, 1930’s tea pots, art deco brooches to a nice Vivienne Westwood jacket. He is passionate about all things wildlife and conservation, an interest that stemmed from early in his childhood where he developed a fascination with all creatures great, small, dead and alive.

At the centre of the book is his relationship with the kestrel he kept; this reminded me of the excellent H is for Hawk. I'd seen some good reviews in the paper, and I enjoy watching Chris Packham on various nature programmes on TV.

In other parts of the book he sees himself as he would have appeared through other people's eyes (the ice cream man, or an elderly neighbour).