With so many writers absolutely convinced of the environmental hazards we face, it was a relief to turn to the views of David Shukman, someone who has no axe to grind. As the BBC’s Environment correspondent he has travelled the globe reporting on the facts. This is the messy, chaotic reality of humans coping with environmental disasters, it’s a view from close-up where people have no global view but have to carry on the best they can, not having the luxury of choice. It’s a compelling read, sobering, worrying yet at times blackly funny, reporting in best John Simpson style. Wonderfully written and often very funny, the book will be loved by travel, science or environment readers alike. Like for Like Reading The Ferocious Summer: Palmer’s Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica, Meredith Hooper The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with “Climate Change” Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History?, Christopher Booker
Reporting Live tells the extraordinary adventures of the BBC's world-roving environment correspondent. Wonderfully written in a style somewhere between Bill Bryson and From Our Own Correspondent, Shukman's book is insightful, engaging and often very funny. When frontline BBC news reporter David Shukman switched beat from world affairs to environment in 2003, he feared he might be in for a dull life. He couldn't have been more wrong. His new job has taken him to every corner of the earth: journeying up the fabled North West Passage in the Arctic, chasing after loggers in the Amazon and battling through plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean, getting trapped in Siberian blizzards along the way. Reporting Live from the End of the World charts Shukman's extraordinary adventures, in the process providing a fascinating eye-witness account of the state of the planet. We follow Shukman through a series of vivid experiences - such as seeing how the Greenland ice sheet has been turned grey by soot from factories thousands of miles away - and observe his gradual, somewhat reluctant, conversion to the environmental cause.
David Shukman has been a BBC television reporter for nearly three decades. He reposted live from East Berlin during the fall of the wall and from conflicts in Bosnia, the Caucasus and Africa. He has broadcast from more than ninety countries and became Environment and Science Correspondent in 2003.
