David Bellamy is a natural story teller whose memoir is packed full of funny anecdotes and observations. He depicts a childhood of discovery and adventure growing up in Carshalton during the second world war. Despite rationing and evacuation, these were happy days of tremendous freedom spent roaming the wonderland of the surrounding countryside searching for bugs, beetles and bits of old shrapnel which young Bellamy and his brother would smuggle home to their father's shed for their firework-making sessions.His growing love of nature is interwoven with loving, often hilarious, portraits of the various characters he meets along the way. From his days as a student in Fifties London to his trial by fire lectureship at Durham University with a young wife and ever-growing family to support, Bellamy reveals his many great loves from sports cars to ballet. He also writes of his more serious concerns, with his reputation for being outspoken and undeterred in the face of big enterprises and corporations revealed in his battles and campaigns.
David Bellamy may not be on our screens as much lately, but there are few who will fail recognise him as one of the most popular names in natural history.
His autobiography, Jolly Green Giant, proves to be every bit as entertaining as anything he's written: it's a fund of hilarious stories (often refreshingly self-deprecating), along with a nicely wrought picture of his childhood growing up in Carshalton during the Second World War. Most of all, though, it's an evocation of the author's love of nature, communicated here with vividness and detail.
His skills have translated into books with considerable ease and such bestsellers as Blooming Bellamy, Botanic Man and Wilderness Britain have been shot through with all the qualities that distinguish his broadcasting, along with a quietly impressive marshalling of the myriad facts that make his work so authoritative.
Although one's heart drops at the subtitle to this book The Autobiography of David J Bellamy OBE, Hon FLS, An Englishman, any thoughts that this might be a breast-beating list of his accomplishments, or (worse) a burst of Little Englander jingoism, are quickly dispelled. Bellamy tells us of his very public battles with big corporations over the environment and the outspokenness that has so often got him into trouble, with only the barest hint of self-aggrandisement. But his epic struggles and odysseys, brilliantly communicated love of nature and the many fascinating portraits of the idiosyncratic and eccentric personalities he's encountered over the years make for a quite fascinating read. --Barry Forshaw
