I own a dozen or three books published by Reaktion and I'm pleased I do; they're intelligent, well-informed, often well-illustrated and sometimes unconventionl and they are usually absorbing, well-written and beautifully produced. Tortoise is no exception, simply because I packed it off to the 2nd-hand bookshop..

The author is clearly fascinated by tortoises and has read a fair ould bit about them. His style is unobjectionable and he sometimes has interesting things to say about them. Unfortunately he has a lot of other things to say that are reminiscent of the things a student taking a test for which she's ill-prepared writes frantically in the vain hope that all those tangential facts and all those redundant ones will disguise her failure to revise.

I could give the pointless detailing of literary references over the years to the tale of the tortoise and the hare or describe the 5 pages of veterinary photos as examples of the padding but I think some of the captions to the illustrations are most telling: If a stele depicts amongst other things a tortoise be sure that you'll be told what irrelevant event or person the stele commemorates. A sculpture of a child 'playing with' (trying to strangle, looks to me) a tortoise is, Young tells us, a work from 1831-3 that is now in 'the Louvre, Paris' and won the sculptor the Legion.d'h. and a commission. A caption to a picture of a fountain that Bernini 'probably' had a hand in, one in which six relatively very tiny tortoises seem to be hanging for dear life onto the lip of a bowl, mentions an artist who influenced Bernini, tells us Bernini's (seldom used) forename and the name of the sculptor who made the fountain and gives the year of the fountain's 'restoration'/modification. The body text is along the same lines and interested though I am in tortoises I gave up reading the book halfway through.

Non solo un libro di zoologia, ma una ricostruzione più ampia della storia culturale della tartaruga che, partendo dall'arte e dalla letteratura, arriva ad essere protagonista del celebre paradosso filosofico e protagonista anche negli studi matematici. E che dire di quante volte la sua immagine è stata utilizzata nella pubblicità e nei gadget?