Peter Henning (1)Critiques

To begin with, his language is flowery and convoluted. He throws quite unrelated things together in a single sentence. I think this is being 'literary'.

He spends a long time on an extended trip to see rare butterflies. OK, not my thing, but if it makes him happy. However, at home he has terrariums of butterflies that he is raising from eggs. To begin with, I'm not sure it is ecologically sound to buy butterfly eggs and raise them in an area where you can't release the adults. However, to do this and then leave, not watch them, but leave someone else to do the work, and to see the butterflies come out of their pupae seems very weird.

The book has black and white drawings of butterflies strewn randomly across the pages, but they can hardly be called illustrations, as they do not seem to be the ones described in the text. Fewer pictures, preferably in colour, and certainly labeled, would be much more useful. I would recommend reading this book (if at all) as an eBook. In an eBook you could easily look up the pictures of the various butterflies. However, it does make the book look very artistic.

In the introduction he talks about wanting to make knowledge about butterflies more accessible to the general reader. I was left with the impression that he really wanted to impress readers with how much more he knows than they do. He didn't impress me. He knows more about them than I do. But I'm not convinced that he really loves and respects them.