I love (auto)biographies and I really enjoy nature programmes with Chris Peckham, so I approached this book with great pleasure.

Unfortunately, I just couldn't get into it. I struggled to read enough to decide that I had given it a fair chance, but it just didn't engage me, no matter how much I wanted it to.

It is a well written book and I am certain that it will appeal to many readers, but it just didn't work for me. As such, I can only give it 3 stars. Others may read it and love it (and I hope that they do) and if they read this review first, they may think "what was that bloke going on about" but I have to review honestly. I rarely fail to finish a book and I may come back to this one another time and devour it, but it is not in my plans.

This book read like it was written by computer AI. Strange sentences and strings of words just for the sake of wordiness. Not for me.

Chris Packham’s Fingers in the Sparkle Jar: a Memoir is indeed unlike any other memoir I’ve ever read. I loved it. It is deeply personal and honest about his childhood and early teenage years. It doesn’t follow any chronological time-line but moves to an event in 1975 when he was fourteen that touched him to his core. Some chapters are in the first person, giving an intense insight into his mind and some in the third person telling of events as though through on onlooker’s eyes. Some parts are told in the third person whilst he was talking to a therapist later in his life – these are raw and intensely moving. There are parts that are so sad and parts where his anger and indeed rage and the cruelty of others come through so very clearly.

They describe his isolation, his separation from other people and his acceptance and recognition that he was different, the ‘loops’ or obsessive thoughts that run repeatedly through your mind, and the stress he experienced because of all that.

I think it is beautifully written, richly descriptive – although if you don’t like adjectives you probably won’t agree with me. I do, and I can’t imagine the book without them, they paint such vivid and colourful images, especially in passages such as those where he describes his ‘sparkle jar‘ – simply wonderful. There is no way I can summarise that, other than to say it is dazzling and scintillating – you need to read the book.

There are many, many passages that will remain with me, such as those about his obsessions with a variety of things from dinosaurs, tadpoles, otters, and snakes, (his description of the enclosure for his snakes they built in the garden is most alarming – they escaped) for example, culminating in his love for the Kestrel he stole from its nest and then took home to rear and train.

Fingers in the Sparkle Jar is a very special book. In his acknowledgements Chris Packham explains the encouragement, patience, tolerance and help he had from his parents, and how he turned their house into a menagerie and the garden into a safari park.

I am of a certain age, my childhood viewing was dominated by two things Mr Phillip Schofield in his pre-greyfox days and the rather interesting spiky hair stylings of one Chris Packham, a young man whose sheer exuberance probably inspired a million child naturalists.

Thanks to the good people at Netgalley, I am privileged to have been given the opportunity to read this memoir by the naturalist best known now for Autumn watch and Spring watch.

This is not a comfortable read by any means, there is a choppiness to the narrative that takes a little bit of getting used to but it is worth the effort. The story of this vulnerable and fragile soul is told often by incidental bystanders, neighbours , shop staff , all the adults whose spheres this rather otherworldly child might have passed through. Often a figure in the distance, always a little too earnest for adults not yet familiar with the (and I hate to use this term) Autism spectrum.

Young Chris is like a much much more intense version of a young Gerald Durrell, a room filled with jars, carcasses and bones, an unlimitless desire to learn and watch every living thing, to see things closer, to exist in the same space as all the wonders of nature is brilliantly demonstrated in the vignettes that make up the book. His passion is fascinating and the enthusiasm we see on our screens today and what endeared me to Chris back in my childhood, is evident in every description of a fall of light on a leaf or the scents and sounds of the wonders he catalogues and researches with such meticulous attention to detail.

The description of the relationship between the kestrel and Chris is some of the most beautiful writing I have seen in a while. Boy and bird have a symbiosis that just leaps off the page.




What makes this book a little bit sobering , is the distinct emotional disconnect that appears to have delineated the isolation that seems to have dogged Chris' formative years. The book made me sad and uncomfortable but Chris's story is compelling.

The tragic meeting of circumstances that led to Chris's suicide attempt is still a little bit nebulous, but the bravery it took to expose this part of his life is astounding. In fact the searing honesty that is evident on every page, the unflinching way he reveals himself is what makes this memoir all the more affecting. Where perhaps Chris lacks in what "normal folk" might consider empathy, his acceptance of the condition is what actually makes Chris extraordinary and his book so memorable.

Highly recommended.

This isn't necessarily an easy memoir to read - the focus moves around through Packham's childhood, the late 1960s to the rise of punk rock in the late 1970s, and drifts back and forth over that period; the language is unusually poetic, with some passages I had to read twice over to get the meaning; but it is certainly worth persisting with. He is obviously an unhappy child, bullied at school, uncommunicative; he enjoys many of the normal hobbies of boys his age, airfix models, subbuteo and sneaky peeks at pornography, but the only thing that seems to give him peace is immersion in the natural world. His early experiments in the biological sciences are not always successful (it turns out a sunny window-sill is not the best place for a jam-jar full of tadpoles) but his fascination with animals and birds is all-consuming.

What made the complexity of his descriptions worthwhile to me was the reminder that these were the words Packham uses to explain how nature grounds him. He is a complicated human being (as so many of us are) but an interesting one (unlike some...). If you take the effort to hear what he has to say he can tell us a lot about what it is like not to fit in and how it can be possible to carve out a place in the world that works for you.

I've never watched Chris Packham on TV so have no idea of his personality but I thought I'd like this book as I love autobiographies. I just didn't get on with this book. It's written as a series of topics but not in chronological order. I was constantly doing mental arithmetic to work out how old he'd be and where in his life this fitted in to the other topics but I quickly got bored with the randomness.

This was frustrating enough but writing is so overly wordy that I just could not get into the book at all. It's absolutely stuffed with adjectives and minute detail of the most mundane things. I realise that this is deliberate on the part of the author to portray how it is for someone with Aspergers syndrome but I do remain sceptical that such minute detail is remembered this way over forty years later, even for someone with Aspergers. I started to read just the sections in italics which are about his sessions with a counsellor in 2003. But even these were written so incomprehensibly I ended up skim reading them. There is a complete mix of writing in the third person interspersed with the first person. The acknowledgements section was the only bit written in the book in a readable fashion.

Call me old fashioned but I expect a biography to go into the background, growing up, family life and careers of the person as well as whatever he/she is famous for.

Absolutely gorgeous. Loved every page. Brought back so many memories from a similar childhood. Will read again and again. Well done, Chris.

This is the true story of a decade in the life of TV nature presenter Chris Packham from the aged of six to sixteen. It also details chapters of his later reflections of his childhood as an adult in the form of therapeutic interviews. It is told with unflinching honesty and paints a picture of a young boy, a vulnerable loner continuously and brutally bullied both by his peers, older children and youths. Chris Packham was an obsessive child. He not only loved the natural world as it is today but the natural history of the world he lived in. He collected obsessively and made sure his diary notations were accurate and informative. Once the keeper of an illegal kestrel, he loved his bird fiercely. It was his best and most loyal friend he had and when his kestrel died it broke Chris’s heart so much that he visited its grave annually in an act of love to reflect on his loss and still moves him emotionally when he speaks about him. It also temporarily made him an elective mute the hurt was so great.
He didn’t have human friends. He was considered a ‘weirdo’ because of his personality, demeanour and obsessions. He was enthusiastic, precise, driven, and knowledgeable, but only about his obsessions. Chris is on the Asperger’s syndrome, but this condition was not commonly diagnosed, although discovered by Austrian psychologist Hans Asperger nearly two decades before Chris was born in 1961. Typically Asperger’s is characterised by a lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships, one-sided conversation, intense absorption in a special interest, and clumsy movements. Asperger called children with AS "little professors" because of their ability to talk about their favourite subject in great detail. Eye contact and social nuances were not picked up on by Chris, and in later life he trained himself to hold eye contact with whoever he was talking to, such was his desire to fit in.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Fingers in the Sparkle Jar’ and greatly admire Chris, as I also love the natural world. His memoir is very moving and I felt huge compassion for the young boy Chris was, cast out in a world beyond his understanding. His greatest loves have always been animals and their deaths have been mourned and deeply affected his life. His story is beautifully written, the language lyrical and poetic, the descriptions so detailed that I felt as though I was gazing into his world with total comprehension of it. The changes in the form of the memoir were a bit puzzling at first, but I quickly adapted to it, as sometimes he wrote in the first person but at other times it was as though he is describing himself looking at his life through binoculars, using the term ‘the boy’ to describe his part in the montage. Sometimes Chris’s story was dark and very disturbing and my heart went out to him, bearing his heart so completely. It was hard to read and a very emotional experience. The magical moments in his life were almost without exception when he was immersed in his wildlife obsessions. I hope Chris will write a sequel to his memoir, because, as Chris wrote in his memoir, the young Chris could never have hoped for or even imagined how his life would turn out; successful, accepted, admired and honoured with accolades in his field as a naturalist. I would like to thank NetGalley and publisher Ebury Digital for my copy of ‘Fingers in the Sparkle Jar: A Memoir’, sent out to me in return for an honest review. I absorbed, touched and greatly enjoyed reading it. Soon to be published in paperback form (May 6th 2017), I recommend this as an excellent read.

An exceptionally atmospheric and touching story of Chris's childhood and the obstacles he had to try and overcome. Written with a variety of indepth details about nature.