"Full of heart, this book is teeming with a love for nature, friendship, self-reflection, and the importance of community. "
This wonderfully honest and heartfelt book salutes volunteering, and also sits as an offering for the meaning of community. It tells the very personal story of a volunteer manager, while celebrating the people who give nature and those around them a helping hand. Carol Donaldson is an ecologist, conservationist, and writer, she has written for the BBC Wildlife magazine, Wanderlust, and The Guardian. This book covers six years, as the author leads a group of countryside conservation volunteers. She is incredibly thoughtful and reflective as she looks back, her honesty is disarming. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Carol and her team, a family and community that was built with blood, sweat, tears (and the occasional near drowning!). The natural elements are just wonderful, described with an abiding yet realistic love. The tidbits of information and history are fascinating, and sit nicely alongside the more personal aspects. I actually feel it would be of benefit for all those working with volunteers (no matter the cause) to read this book. I’ve worked for three charities, have managed volunteers, and also been a volunteer, a lot of these stories caused echoes of feelings to cascade back into force. While Carol credits a previous manager with teaching her how to treat the volunteers she worked with, she obviously also had a lot of her own gifts to pass on. This, this is what volunteering should be about! The Volunteers is a sincere, heart-warming, and compelling book, highly recommended.
| Primary Genre | Nature and the natural world: general interest |
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