Lovely, unique, quiet book. Being with nature and beyond. ( )

Marc Hamer had a long career as a mole catcher in England, until one day when he abruptly gave up this form of livelihood. In How to Catch a Mole he writes about the craft of mole catching, interspersed with accounts of an earlier time when, as a young man, he left home with no job or permanent address and had to survive on his own. This period of vagrancy made him value solitude and being close to nature, both of which informed subsequent life choices. After all, mole-catching is solitary work, typically carried out in fields while hunting for the moles’ underground tunnels

This memoir will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about moles, both how they live and the many ways humans have tried to rid themselves of moles, generally for aesthetic reasons. While a large mole population can be damaging for those who earn their living by farming, this book might make you question the need to kill them simply to have a prettier lawn. After all, every species plays a role in our ecosystems.

Alongside the discussion of moles and mole-catching, Hamer also reflects on the aging process and the importance of love and family to a man who experienced little of either during his youth. This personal dimension coupled with his insights on the natural world really worked for me. ( )

This is a lovely, quiet little book. A wonderful meditation on life and aging. ( )

This book was just lovely, far more than I had anticipated. It’s a blend of memoir, natural history writing and poetry. The author was for many years a molecatcher, using traditional methods. He states at the beginning of the book that he’s going to tell you what he knows about moles and how to catch them (if you need to), but he goes about it in a very meandering fashion. There will be one little tidbit of information that starts off a chapter, then gently diverges into a story about how he wandered fields and hedgerows as a homeless young man, or how he feels about the current state of his family, or just observations on the weather and scenery about him as he does his work. You get one piece of the picture about moles every ten pages it seems, with a lot of musings and quiet observations on other nature things in between. Which I didn’t at all mind. For once I also didn’t mind the back-and-forth of the narrative- sometimes about his past, sometimes present tense, sometimes thinking on the future, and not at all in order. There are thoughts on gardening, on why he prefers solitude, on how the landscape has changed as the years pass, as housing and industry slowly replace the fields. There’s a lot about how nature recycles everything back into something new to grow again. I really liked that. In the end, he finally tells about placing the traps and how his knowledge of mole behavior enables him to catch them without fail- and then why he no longer wants to do so. I liked everything about this book. The voice and sentiments immediately resonated with me, the black and white woodcut-style illustrations by Joel McLaren are so nice, I even liked the parts expressed in poetry (which usually isn’t my thing). This is right up there with H is for Hawk, Braiding Sweetgrass and Bringing Nature Home. ( )

Margaret Renkl's recommended book reads almost as an organic experience -- I can smell and touch the Welsh natural surroundings that Hamer shares. Hamer practices what other writers of nature too often fail to achieve. He places nature primary over the self. He emphasizes that his life -- blessings and hardships -- is moving forward to become part of the soil and wind and rivers that he inhabited in his homeless youthful wanderings. In older age, now, he writes: "At the end of each day I feel full, and perhaps this is more than just acceptance of change, perhaps this is another 'becoming.'" His musings interweave with his natural surroundings. He mentions his children now out of the nest, but does not sink into details which can lose many readers who have sat down with books on nature, not for family histories or the me-orientation of too many writers, but for reflections on the natural world of our planet. I confess that my standard for judging such books are Leopold, Thoreau, Barry Lopez, Loren Eiseley and Henry Beston. Hamer compares favorably except in one glaring and critical point. And that point is the very fulcrum of the book itself. Hamer makes a living collecting bounties on moles. Toward the end of the book, Hamer gives a history of mole - catching, beginning with the Romans who did not want their "grapevines and other crops uprooted by moles. He adds: "They wanted to grow unspoiled flower gardens." While Hamer professes atheism, much of his writing moves in a Buddhist direction. He mentions the parallel early on. Yet, as a person who has meditated for hours in different sects of Buddhist temples ranging from Theravada to Mahayana to Japanese Zen, I cannot avoid emphasizing that, in all of them, the session ends with this simple blessing: "May all beings be happy." Hamer gets paid per each mole he has killed. A case could be made for the need to rid the Welsh countryside of moles. An enlightened rebuttal could see the bounty Hamer collects on each mole as a prodigious inconsistency with his reverence for his natural surroundings. And worse. Killing moles for bounty? Why? To keep meadows and gardens "unspoiled." I cannot help thinking of the farmers who poison and hunt wolves and coyotes with the justification that they are protecting their livestock. I don't buy this falsehood. The benefit of wolves and coyotes reverberates to the far greater good than any harm to a farmer's livestock. It is a myth that has justified in no small part the genocide perpetrated against other species who inhabit our planet. Henry Beston, "The Outer -Most House," pleads across the century against the killing of other species: "They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life.... Toward the end of the book, I began to feel with increasing intensity Hamer's inconsistency. "Occasionally during the breeding season I will pull out a trap that's caught two moles." Here Mr. Hamer lost me, along with Renkl's shinning recommendation. "Altogether in this field I catch eight moles today." I remember a book from years ago, entitled, "Life List." The author wrote about all the birds he had shot in his youth, but that now that he is older, he has put down his guns, expecting the reader's understanding. The book plows forward while its author names the species he has shot, some now endangered. Hamer manages the same pirouette: "I had to whack him hard five times before he is dead," he writes. And three sentences later: "I had rarely had to kill anything without using a machine that did it for me...." Hamer decries that "until people learn to embrace a bit of wildness in the nature outside their back door, molecatchers will continue to thrive." When, at book's end, he decides to retire, he shares how mole catching has allowed him to "treat the wild outside as a precious home....To feel directly connected to the breath of the air that fuels me, to the soil and the sun and the rain that feed me." No sympathy from me and, alas, regarding "How to Catch a Mole," a reluctant withdrawal of sympathy from any recommendation to read it. ( )