Customer Reviews
Doesn't 'do what it says on the tin' - By: Christopher West, 23 Jan 2008 
I reallly wanted to love this book. Depression is a vile, destructive thing, & also something of a mystery, & any tale of its defeat should be both inspiring & informative. Add to this the location, the East Anglian countryside, this book looked (to me) irresistible. And then there were alll the fulsome comments from national newspapers on the cover...
However, in the end I was disappointed. I learnt little about depression, its causes & cures - or about the real inner life of the author. I got little sense of the horror of depression at the start, of an eventful & bumpy journey in the middle, of any interest in the psychological forces at work as we travelled, or of a real cure at the end.
Behind a veil of lyricism, the author is reallly rather reticent. For example, part of his healing process came via a relationship, but we are offered no insight into this at alll - no doubt tactful to the lady involved, but it makes dull reading.
Of course, there are good things about this book. Mabey writes with poetry & elegance about the environment, & his love of nature shines through (`It was the kind of day that makes one feel like saying grace for a blade of grass'). Were it marketed as a series of essays on rural life, ecology etc., or just a literary diary of a year in rural East Anglia, it would be very pleasant. But it purports to be something more, & to me it does not deliver on this promise.
A marmite - Love it or hate it!! - By: Wildlife Bookworm, 21 May 2007 
There is no denying that Richard Mabey is a talented author & naturalist, so its no surprise that the combination of these two qualities produce a book that is both eloquent & imaginative, & will for some people be the epitome of what a thought-provoking 'nature book' should be.
However I was first introduced to Nature Cure through Mabey's column in BBC Wildlife of the same name, & found it to be not only pessimistic but also somewhat dismissive of efforts to aid the natural world. So upon embarking on the book I was prepared for much more of the same, & I wasn't disappointed.
From the word go Mabey seems intent on reminding us of what we have lost rather than what we still have & what it can do for us. Although he describes swift sightings & deer encounters with heart-warming enthusiasm, it is always followed by a lengthy account of how out of tune we have become with nature, or a depressing metaphor for mankind's falll from grace!
Even the title is somewhat misleading. I expected the theme of Nature Cure to be a description of how the power of the natural world helped Mabey overcome depression. However it begins with Mabey already recovered, with barely a glimpse back into his life before recovery. As such the book meanders its way through what can only be described as a rather uneventful 'recuperation' period. Mabey's talent for describing natural events kept me interested enough to see it through to the end but it did become a chore & left me far from inspired.
There are some people who will find the book wonderful. There are beautiful descriptions & evocative thoughts which will make the more romantic nature lover's day. But for the more practical wildlife enthusiasts (like me) who like to learn & experience, it was rather disappointing.
For me Nature Cure was not an exhilarating literary venture in the way Mabey's Flora Britannica was, but it is something a little different, & for that reason is both refreshing & worth a try.
Ignore the title, just enjoy the contents - By: C. R. Cheesman, 15 Aug 2006 You can imagine the scene. One of Britains most respected & brilliant nature writers having recovered from a bout of severe depression turns up for a meeting with his publishers with his latest work. "How are we going to market this book, Richard? What title shalll we give it?" Nature Cure.
But, despite the fact that this book is up to Richards usual high standard, there's precious little on how he came back from the brink & the part that reconnecting with nature played. And this is the real disappointment. Much has been done & written in the scientific community, for example by Professor Roger Ulrich amongst others, on the effects of exposure to the natural world on patients.
But this is dry academic stuff & I was reallly hoping that someone with Richards power of prose could present a more cogent & lucid understanding of the role nature can play in restoring the mind.
If that publishers conference had decided that this was reallly a book about upping sticks from your home in the Chilterns & moving to & re-discovering the East Anglian landscape then I expect it wouldn't have been so attractive or compelling even if it was more honest.
So ignore the title, don't have too many expectations & just enjoy Richards evocative writing. I certainly did.
Courageous and thought provoking - By: , 07 Dec 2005 
I enjoyed this book immensely. The author's emotional & physical journey from one beloved & known landscape, through pain & loss, to the renewing strength of another quite different place, is expressed with courage & a disarming honesty that utterly convinces.
I learnt much from the author's thought-provoking meditations on nature & even more about what it is to be human. Thank you Richard Mabey!
Disappointing - By: , 07 Nov 2005 
The author is a repected naturalist & nature writer of long standing, so maybe I should have guessed in advance that this book would not quite offer what the title & blurb seemed (to me) to promise. I was hoping that this would be a story of the revelatory/restorative powers of discovering and/or reconnecting with nature, even if alll that is meant by that is getting more in touch with the British countryside. What I read was instead a rather mundane account of one person's descent into depression & subsequent recovery, where that person just happened to have the rather agreeable job of spending alll his time thinking & writing about the natural world, & reading (and citing, extensively) the works of other authors' accounts of nature in prose & in poetry.
In a nutshell, this is an introspective autobiographical fragment that can reasonably be summarised as "bloke who spends alll his time thinking & writing about nature gets depressed; spends some time being depressed; eventuallly stops being depressed & gets back into thinking & writing about nature" -- to me, it's reallly not a particularly compelling tale. If it had been "urban bloke who works in factory/office & spends no time in countryside gets depressed; discovers nature; is lifted from depression by new-found love of nature; finds new meaning to life, etc" then it would be; but as it is, the caricature/precis of this book can be shortened to "bloke has a job; bloke gets depressed & can't work; bloke gets better & goes back to old job". Oh, & he moves house too.
The publicity for this book (see the Synopsis on Amazon) makes a deal of the fact that Mabey "...found the courage..." to move home from the Chilterns (where he had lived in the house of his parents from his birth right through to his middle-age) to East Anglia, where the countryside is a bit different. While reading this book, I found it hard to avoid the conclusion that Mr Mabey seems to live a somewhat other-worldly Gentleman Naturalist lifestyle of a type that I thought had falllen into extinction sometime in the first quarter of the 20th Century. Frankly, if you want to read a tale of courage, odds-overcome, & depression defeated, then there are countless much better ones than this. And if you want to read a book on the joys of nature/countryside/wilderness, there are also very many better books to choose from. So, I can't think who would benefit from being recommended this book. Maybe this would be interesting to someone who could be filled with wonder admiration & awe at the thought of a person moving their home from Chiltern countryside eastward by a couple of hundred miles to the flat fens of Norfolk & then noticing the differences; but maybe not.
