The four women profiled in Prof. Matthew Kelly’s new book are very much deserving of our thanks and praise for all the work they did to make it possible for so many people today still to be able to enjoy some of England’s most important, iconic, and beautiful urban green spaces and wild natural areas.
2015 is shaping up to be the year when I am given the privilege to revisit a number of old literary friends. From Albert Camus’ Meursault in Kamel Daoud’s new “The Meursault Investigation” to Harper Lee’s Scout Finch in “Go Set a Watchman” and now, so I recently discovered, Jacqueline Kelly’s Calpurnia Tate in “The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate.”
Of all the creatures that fly, swim, or crawl across the face of the planet, perhaps none more commonly inspire feelings of unease, queasiness, and outright fear than spiders.
Calpurnia Tate is the child all naturalists wish they were as children: endlessly curious, possessing of boundless energy, and most important of all, beginning their explorations of the natural world at an age when the mind has not yet been conditioned to repress questions because they might seem silly or pointless to others.