How They Live and Why They Matter

The Secret Life of Trees

'One of those books that you want everyone to have already read' Sunday Telegraph

Colin Tudge's The Secret Life of Trees: How they Live and Why they Matter explores the hidden role of trees in our everyday lives - and how our future survival depends on them. 
 
 What is a tree? As this celebration of the trees shows, they are our countryside; our ancestors descended from them; they gave us air to breathe. Yet while the stories of trees are as plentiful as leaves in a forest, they are rarely told. 
 
 Here, Colin Tudge travels from his own back garden round the world to explore the beauty, variety and ingenuity of trees everywhere: from how they live so long to how they talk to each other and why they came to exist in the first place. Lyrical and evocative, this book will make everyone fall in love with the trees around them. 
 
 'A love-letter to trees' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Financial Times 
 
 'One of those books you want everyone to have already read' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sunday Telegraph 
 
 'Wonderful, invaluable and timely. Tudge is as illuminating a guide as one could wish for' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Daily Mail 
 
 'Everyone interested in the natural world will enjoy The Secret Life of Trees. I found myself reading out whole chunks to friends' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The Times Books of the Year 
 
 Colin Tudge started his first tree nursery in his garden aged 11, marking his life-long interest in trees. Always interested in plants and animals, he studied zoology at Cambridge and then began writing about science, first as features editor at the New Scientist and then as a documentary maker for the BBC. Now a full-time writer, he is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of Philosophy at the London School of Economics. His books include The Variety of Life and So Shall We Reap.

Colin Tudge started his first tree nursery in his garden aged 11, marking his life-long interest in trees. Always interested in plants and animals, he studied zoology at Cambridge and then began writing about science, first as features editor at the New Scientist and then as a documentary maker for the BBC. Now a full-time writer, he appears regularly as a public speaker, particularly for the British Council and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of Philosophy at the London School of Economics. His books include The Variety of Life and So Shall We Reap. 
 
The Secret Life of Trees brings together Colin Tudge's knowledge of trees and his fascination with them, built up from trips to the rainforest in Costa Rica, Panama and Brazil, to his time India, New Zealand, China, the United States ... and his own back garden. He is unable to choose a favourite tree, believing that variety's the thing.

'Everyone interested in the natural world will enjoy The Secret Life of Trees. I found myself reading out whole chunks to friends' The Times, Books of the Year 
 
What is a tree? As this celebration of the trees shows, they are our countryside; our ancestors descended from them; they gave us air to breathe. Yet while the stories of trees are as plentiful as leaves in a forest, they are rarely told. 
 
Here, Colin Tudge travels from his own back garden round the world to explore the beauty, variety and ingenuity of trees everywhere: from how they live so long to how they talk to each other and why they came to exist in the first place. Lyrical and evocative, this book will make everyone fall in love with the trees around them.

What's Gone Wrong with the World's Food - and How to Fix it

So Shall We Reap

Are we really living in a land of plenty? One day our food supplies may actually run out

Colin Tudge is a freelance writer and researcher. His work has featured in the New Statesman, Farmer's Weekly, New Scientist and on the BBC. He is visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of Philosophy at the London School of Economics.

A work that focuses on the relentless drive for maximum food production at rock-bottom cost. As health scares spiral, rural workers are driven off the land and poor nations are forced to export their goods in a cut-throat marketplace. Colin Trudge proposes an alternative, looking at the global food industry and showing how - without resorting to GM crops - corporate barons can be stripped of control, the world can be fed and humanity can survive.

Five Million Years of Human History

The Day Before Yesterday

A breathtakingly wide-angled history of the past five million years and a wonderful account of some of the most magnificent animals the world has ever seen. 'History at its most subversive, history that inspires and terrifies'. WASHINGTON POST

This brilliant and ambitious book is an account of the events that made our world the place it is - geologically, climatically and ecologically - and a call for a new way of thinking about history. 'We learn', Tudge writes, 'to think only in desperately trivial twinklings of time. . . But this contracted view of time is not merely comic. It is dangerous. ' The proper sense of time, he argues, is one that allows us to appreciate the world and see what we are doing to it. If humankind is to survive, we must UNLEARN most of what made us good at dominating our environment up to now.

Engineer In The Garden

Does for genetics what THE BLIND WATCHMAKER did for biology: it explains, it excites, it makes us imagine and think. Nature is the 'garden' of the title; the 'engineer' is the geneticist, far less in control than he or she thinks.

The Engineer in the Garden is an engagingly quirky and broadly informed account of modern genetics, heredity and evolution that teems with the latest facts, briskly and brightly conveyed... If you are concerned about the genetic future, you could do no better than to read this wise and thoughtful book.

In his excellent account of what we are about to let ourselves in for, Colin Tudge unravels the mysteries of genetic engineering and its applications with great skill.

A mammoth task at which he succeeds admirably.

Could not be bettered as a popular introduction to genetic knowledge.

Science writer Colin Tudge was born on 22 April 1943 in London, and was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He worked as a journalist and was features editor for New Scientist magazine between 1980 and 1984, before joining the BBC where he worked on science programmes for BBC Radio, presenting the regular programme 'Spectrum'. He is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines including The Independent, The Times, Natural History and the New Statesman. He is a former member of the Council of The Zoological Society of London and since 1995 has been a visiting Research Fellow of the Centre for Philosophy at the London School of Economics. 
 
Two of his books have been shortlisted for the COPUS/Rhone Poulence Science Book of the Year: Last Animals at the Zoo (1991) and The Engineer in the Garden (1993). The Day Before Yesterday (1995) won the B.P. Conservation Book of the Year Award. His latest book is The Secret Life of Trees (2005).

Today we are developing a science that could change the world - for good or ill - more quickly and more profoundly than ever before. The science of genetics promises - or threatens - nothing less than the creation of life. 
 
Colin Tudge leads the reader gently through the deepest intricacies of genetics. He traces its history. He explores its awesome power and its current applications. And he speculates on its thrilling - or terrifying - future. He has written an essential book for anyone interested in the future of the human race.

Colin Tudge

Who they are and what they do

All animals are equal - but some, as George Orwell said, are more equal than others, and birds, most people would surely agree, are in the very first rank. They can do almost everything that mammals can do - and more. By mastering flight, they have a way of living that encompasses the whole world. In The Secret Life of Birds, Colin Tudge explores the life of birds, all around the globe. From the secrets of migration to their complicated family lives, their differing habitats and survival techniques to the secrets of flight, this is a fascinating account of how birds live, why they matter, and whether they really are dinosaurs. Colin Tudge shows how birds - who are like us in the general sense but very different in the particulars - live and think. For birds have minds: they feel, they are aware, they work things out. And so, by considering the birds, asking how and why it is possible for them to be so different, we gain insight into ourselves. 
 
Birds are beautiful, lively, intriguing - and all around us. This rich and endlessly absorbing book opens up their lives to everyone.

Colin Tudge

Books by Colin Tudge

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