Listen :
Availability:
Available to listen.
Last broadcast on Sat, 27 Feb 2010, 10:00 on BBC Radio 4.
Synopsis
Zoologist and conservationist Mark Carwardine talks to John McCarthy about his life travelling to film, photograph and write about creatures which inhabit the deepest oceans or the dustiest plains. In 1990 he went in search of animals nearing extinction with Douglas Adams and more recently with Stephen Fry and, as an occasional leader of wildlife expeditions, he shares his thoughts on the ethics of animal tourism, ecology and the environment.
John also meets Robin Bayley, who went to Mexico in search of traces of his great grandfather who went to work there and, according to family legend, consorted with bandits and had to hot-foot it back to Britain during the revolution of 1910. Robin not only finds the pleasures of rural Mexico but more than he bargained for in terms of family history. And Mexican author and British resident Chloe Aridjis tells John about her perspective on her homeland from Europe and whether Mexico's Spanish heritage makes it in any sense culturally European.
MARK CARWADINE
Mark Carwardine has written about 50 books on various aspects of wildlife. He first became well known 20 years ago as Douglas Adams’s companion in travelling the world in the radio series Last Chance to See – Stephen Fry recently replaced Adams in the updated TV version - in which they looked for many of the disappearing species of the world. Over the years Mark has co-founded several wildlife-tour companies, and has been Chairman of the Judging Panel of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition, since 2005. His own collection of wildlife and conservation photographs, taken in more than 100 countries, is sold through picture agencies around the world. He will be co-presenting The Museum of Life, a BBC2 television six-part series due to be broadcast from Thursday 18 March at 8pm on BBC2.
CHLOE ARIDJIS
Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican American writer. Her father Homero Aridjis is a Greek Mexican writer and diplomat who has published 38 books of poetry and prose. Born in New York, US, Chloe grew up in Holland until she was 7, where her father was serving as Mexico's ambassador, and then until the age of 17 in Mexico City. She then studied Comparative Literature at Harvard and received a PhD from the University of Oxford. Her book of essays on Magic and Poetry in nineteenth-century France was released in 2005. She has published in journals and newspapers in England and Mexico, and, after five years in Berlin, currently resides in London. Her first novel Book of Clouds was published in winter 2009.
She is reading and discussing her work at the Jewish Book Week in London on Wednesday 3rd March
Book of Clouds
Publisher: Grove Press (3 Mar 2009)
ISBN-10: 0802170560 / ISBN-13: 978-0802170569
ROBIN BAYLEY
Robin Bayley was born in North Yorkshire. He grew up in Sheffield and moved to London after college where he worked in advertising and children’s TV. He has also worked as a teacher in Colombia. His first book is The Mango Orchard: a journey back to the secret heart of Mexico. He went to Mexico in the early nineties to try and track his great grandfather’s movements there in the years before the 1910 Mexican revolution. In August 2004, as he was starting work on The Mango Orchard, Robin was interviewed by John Peel for BBC Radio 4’s Home Truths, in what turned out to be one of Peel’s last interviews.
The Mango Orchard
Publisher: Preface Publishing (4 Mar 2010)
ISBN-10: 1848092237 / ISBN-13: 978-1848092235
Broadcast
-
Sat 27 Feb 201010:00
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~36~RS~){kind=small}