Richard Smyth
Back to Nature
Natural: The Seductive Myth of Nature’s Goodness
By Alan Levinovitz
Profile 272pp £20 order from our bookshop
The Natural Health Service: What the Great Outdoors Can Do for Your Mind
By Isabel Hardman
Atlantic 336pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
At the outset of Alan Levinovitz’s profound, thoughtful and wide-ranging exploration of the ‘natural’, the author stakes out a middle ground between ‘the orthodoxies of nature worship’ and the categorical dismissal of all appeals to natural goodness (an ‘equally pernicious form of faith’). One might be forgiven for wondering at this point how such common-sense even-handedness can be sustained across some three hundred pages, but Levinovitz confounds these doubts by demonstrating how entrenched the false dichotomy of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ is in 21st-century discourse, far beyond the obvious battlegrounds of, say, food and healthcare.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me