The sami

A peek at the horoscope, puzzling the meaning of dreams, wearing lucky socks, having a method for choosing lottery numbers – many otherwise rational people retain a vestigial interest in prediction to ensure favourable outcomes. I’ll happily admit to a fascination with Tarot cards – and I do seem to be an archetypal bossy Aries. Christopher Dell’s Prophecies demonstrates just how widespread a belief in divination has always been across cultures, however peculiar or unsavoury the methods. In ordering his vast material, Dell sets out some ‘categories of convenience which allow us to impose some structure on a naturally amorphous topic’.

As an angler in pursuit of fish across some 45 countries, I have travelled in a variety of precarious watercraft, from a Tahitian va’a to a coracle in Coorg, and remain convinced that all buoyant vessels are merely looking for somewhere to sink. In his study of the cultural history of small boats around the north Atlantic, David Gange, an academic historian and devotee of the kayak, argues that they are in fact transports of delight, and a key component in the survival of precious maritime communities.

Covering 20 per cent of the Earth’s surface, the boreal forest is the largest living system, or ‘biome’, on land. It contains one third of all the planet’s trees and encircles much of the northern hemisphere in a halo of green. The northernmost extent of this forest, called the treeline, marks the point beyond which it is too cold for trees to grow. This is perhaps not where you’d expect to find Ben Rawlence, an author and journalist whose previous books have focused on humanitarian crises in Africa. But, as he explains in The Treeline, things are changing alarmingly fast in this biome: ‘The trees are on the move. They shouldn’t be. And this sinister fact has enormous consequences for all life on Earth.