Country A Continent, A Scientist and a Kangaroo: Tim Flannery (engl.) 258 S.

In this, his most personal book yet, Tim Flannery draws on three decades of travel, research, and fieldwork to craft a love letter to his native land and one of its most unique and beloved inhabitants: the kangaroo.

Crisscrossing the continent, Flannery shows us how the destiny of this extraordinary creature is inseparable from the environment that created it. Along the way he uses encounters with ancient aboriginal cultures and eccentric fossil hunters, farmers and scientists, kangaroo advocates and kangaroo hunters, to explore how Australia's deserts and rain forests have shaped human responses to the continent -- and how kangaroos have evolved to handle the resulting challenges. Ultimately, the book is an appealingly erudite yet utterly readable synthesis of memoir, travel, natural history, and evolutionary science - and further proof of Flannery's offhand interdisciplinary brilliance (Entertainment Weekly).

"Country" is almost unclassifiable. It is partly about Flannery's formative years as a palaeontologist, partly a natural history of the Australian landscape, and partly a study of the evolution of kangaroos, which, I know, sounds like three reasons not to read it. In fact, from beginning to end it is absorbing, funny, and wondrously learned (Bill Bryson).