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Title: A Slow Passion

Subtitle: Snails, My Garden and Me

Author: Ruth Brooks

Narrator: Kelly Birch

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-10-14

Publisher: Audible Studios for Bloomsbury

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Environment

Publisher's Summary:

When BBC Radio 4's Material World programme announced a search for the UK's top amateur scientist, little did anyone expect that the winning experiment would comprise one of our humblest garden pests. Ruth Brooks posed this question: Do snails have a homing instinct?

The nation was gripped by the unexpected thesis and by Ruth's online diaries, which catalogued her trials and tribulations as she got to grips with these slimy little gastropods.

A Slow Passion is Ruth's story, with anecdotes and misadventures galore. What starts out as a ruthless vendetta against the snails that are decimating her hostas becomes a journey of discovery into the whys and wherefores of snail life. When Ruth dumps a group of the worst offending snails in a far-off wood, she decides to paint their shells with nail varnish, just to see what happens. And guess what, they come back home.

This is the beginning of an obsession that sees the grandmother-turned-scientist prowling about and pouncing on the snails in her garden, sneaking off on night-time missions to repatriate bucket loads of painted snails, reading up on the sex-life of snails (which turns out to be unexpectedly romantic) and, eventually, sending off the application to a national competition for home science.

With charming illustrations, A Slow Passion is a sweet, funny and surprising investigation into the hidden life of snails, which will change the way you look at the smaller (and slower) things in life.

Members Reviews:

"In The Garden, Nothing Had Changed - Except Me."

Written with an eloquence that rivals Ruth Brook's vast scientific curiosity, this little book proved to be a deeply inspirational account of how one woman made her peace with the molluscs invading her garden, and in so doing, found peace within herself as well. It begins as a nostalgic memoir of her childhood in the 1940s-50s, within the context of her enduring love of nature. Along the way, snails play a role in her memories, but it is not until she begins to wonder how to rid her flowerbeds of these "pests" without killing them that she takes a long-shot and enters the BBC Amateur Scientist competition.

From here on, the book becomes heavy on science. The author has a marvelous style of writing, a rare blend of entertaining and educational. She is quite enthusiastic about her subject, while her recounting of the trials, tribulations and successes of her homing instinct experiment, were, for this snail enthusiast, thrilling to read. Incidentally, Ruth Brooks has gone no little way in proving what most snail owners would already swear to - that they are far more intelligent than modern science would suggest, and in particular, snails have a memory.

Throughout the experiment, she is beset with challenges, which she overcomes with a positive outlook, and it becomes amazing, even to those few of us who are so fond of our gastropods, that such a tiny, seemingly unimportant creature as the snail could be the catalyst that so profoundly changed her outlook on herself, and her place in Nature. That all lives are of significance.

For mollusc lovers, this book is the Holy Grail of Snail Tomes. It was also very much uplifting, the sort of thing that restores one's faith in humanity.