Book reviews in brief: Be a Birder by Hamza Yassin, Fear by Robert Peckham, Dangerous Children by Kenneth Gross

Be a Birder by Hamza Yassin (Hachette UK, £16.99)

The author of this ‘practical guide’ to, and celebration of, birding may be best known as the winner of 2022 ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ competition. However, if Yassin’s dancing has brought the wildlife cameraman and ‘Countryfile’ presenter fame, it is not fame that Yassin is chasing. Yassin has become a celebrity in the world of birders, twitchers and wildlife enthusiasts because he is good at doing what he loves. “When people ask me what it is I love about birds, my first answer is that they can fly,” Yassin writes. While some may find Yassin’s unbridled enthusiasm a little grating, if not cringy, this reader loved it for its sincerity. ‘Be a Birder’ is a monophonic text; this isn’t about nature as a metaphor for human existence, it is simply about birds and the joy of observing them. Brigid O’Dea

Fear: An Alternative History of the World by Robert Peckham (Profile Books, £25)

Peckham is a cultural historian and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society who began considering the subject of fear while living in Hong Kong amid the Chinese crackdown a few years ago, which in turn made him look back to his experience of a bombing in 1980s Pakistan. He sets out to show that fear should not just be linked to tyranny but is also “an integral facet of empowerment”. It’s a mildly diverting read and like its subject probably best processed in chunks, although by the end the book’s overarching ambition as “an alternative history of the world” never quite comes off. The cultural references feel well-worn (Hobbes, Kierkegaard, Orwell, Bruegel etc) and the historical events seem self-evident and too heavily weighted towards Western society. NJ McGarrigle

Dangerous Children by Kenneth Gross (University of Chicago Press, £22)

The eight child characters from literature featured are Carroll’s Alice, Collodi’s Pinocchio, James’s Maisie, Barrie’s Peter, Kafka’s Odradek, Hughes’s Emily, Bowen’s Portia and Nabokov’s Lolita. Their fascination for Gross lies in their “playfulness, wilfulness, capacity for survival and transformation, bluntness and violence, unpredictability” and “fierce curiosity about the adult world” while refusing to accommodate its rules. He believes they make us think differently about innocence, how it can get lost or endure or change form. His character choice is personal, as is their impact on him. For example, of Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, he writes: “I keep going back over the book in my mind, trying to give shape to that sadness, to say where it lies.” An original – and fruitful – approach to literary criticism. Brian Maye