Adventures of a Young Naturalist

Image credit: Amazon UK

This week on the Couch I’ve decided to take a break from the world of fantasy and opt for something fascinating, educational, and real: David Attenborough’s memoirs, Adventures of a Young Naturalist.

This intriguing and eloquently written book chronicles three key expeditions at the beginning of Attenborough’s career in which he, Charles Lagus, and Jack Lester travelled around the globe to film exotic animals in their natural habitat, as well as capture some to bring back to the London Zoo. The expeditions were called ‘Zoo Quest’ and this book covers the first three in which the trio travel to Guyana, Komodo to find the legendary Dragons, and Paraguay to find giant armadillos.

A blend of modern history as well as autobiographical stories and anecdotes, Adventures of a Young Naturalist is the perfect fusion of educational and entertaining literature. Attenborough’s recognisable voice serves as a wondrous inner narrator, which makes the stories and bouts of exposition all the more accessible and digestible because it causes the book to read more like an intellectual dinner conversation rather than a dry heap of history and lectures.

Attenborough’s prose is beautifully structured and infused with a distinctive ‘documentary narrator’s’ vibe as well as a number of more personal descriptions of his adventures, which makes the reading experience all the more enjoyable. The book’s division into three parts, each detailing the adventures upon three different journeys, helps to break up the monotony that always sits on the fringes of non-fiction works (especially ones that chronicle history) and the photographs that are also included serve as a wonderfully refreshing break from the (admittedly) long stream of narrative.

Image credit: Daily Mail

Despite the majority of the adventures being quite fascinating and inspiring feelings of reflective/sympathetic hope, disappointment, and desperation in the reader, the book can on occasion become a little wordy; making the reader take in the words on the page without really penetrating the meaning or feelings behind them, but aside from that one downside Adventures of a Young Naturalist is a captivating book, definitely a must-read for fans of Attenborough and his wonderful BBC Earth documentaries.

Adventures of a Young Naturalist is a collection of memoirs from Sir David Attenborough, compiled from various notes and journal entries over many years (1955, 1957, and 1959) and first published as a complete novel by Lutterworth Press in 1980 (Zoo Quest Expeditions: Travels in Guyana, Indonesia and Paraguay). This edition was first published in 2017 by Two Roads.