Amazing, earthy, memorable....why have I never read this before?

I enjoyed the entire book, but there were a handful of poems I could read over and over again.

This is a thoroughly satisfying British mystery featuring Ruth Galloway, forensic archaeologist and older single mother. The story also features British aristocrats, racehorses, my favorite modern druid, and a conflict over the repatriation and/or reburial of Native remains from Australia.

...the illustrations and layout of the text don't thrill me in this "first nature guide".

This was a rather poetically written short volume on botany - specifically, the botany of flowers. It has very nice chapters on scent, pollen, trapping insects, classification (a la Linnaeus), evolution, etc.

Here's a fun sentence about pollen that illustrates Russell's style:

"On the very nicest of days, when the air is slightly fresh, when the sun is pleasantly warm, when trouble-some insects have not yet appeared or are already gone, we live and breathe in an effluvia of male sex cells." (p. 93).

However, she's wrong about the pollen found on the Neandertal skeletons in Iraq....it was said in 1975 that it was evidence for burial with flowers (cited in the endnotes), but the rebuttal from the 90's showing that the pollen was just in the water and sediment that covered the skeletons never was as well popularized. Just FYI. It just wasn't as cool a story as the flowers on the grave, I guess, and it never made it to the popular media.

Or, as non-archaeologists call them, stone tools.

There is an awful lot of jargon and staid prose in this volume. If you're truly interested in the PaleoIndian period and the different hypotheses for the peopling of America, then you'll definitely learn something from this volume - but I don't think you'll enjoy it. I remain ambivalent about the idea that people using Solutrean tools in Europe migrated across the North Atlantic and founded a tradition of stone tool making that included Clovis points.