Taking Flight by Lev Parikian

I’m an idiot. Now I realise this will come as no surprise to many of you, but the reason I say so at the moment is because I have been sitting on this review of Taking Flight by Lev Parikian for 6 months. I actually read and reviewed Taking Flight in April ahead of my intended Deepings Literary Festival interview with Lev at the beginning of May. However, I went on a cruise, caught Covid, missed the festival, burnt myself horrendously with a hot water bottle leak (still not healed) had a whole litany of family issues, illnesses, operations and deaths and completely forgot all about it! 

So, with enormous apologies to Lev and to Amy Greaves of Elliott & Thompson who kindly sent me a copy of Taking Flight, today, at last, I’m sharing my review. You’ll find my review of Lev’s Into The Tangled Bank and our chat about Music to Eat Cake By through the links here.

Taking Flight was released in paperback by Elliott & Thompson on 16th May 2024 and us available for purchase through the publisher links here. 

Taking Flight

This is the miracle of flight as you’ve never seen it before: the evolutionary story of life on the wing.

A bird flits overhead. It’s an everyday occurrence, repeated hundreds, thousands, millions of times daily by creatures across the world. It’s something so normal, so entirely taken for granted, that sometimes we forget how extraordinary it is. But take that in for a moment. This animal flies. It. Flies. The miracle of flight has evolved in hugely diverse ways, with countless variations of flapping and gliding, hovering and diving, murmurating and migrating.

Conjuring lost worlds, ancient species and ever-shifting ecologies, this exhilarating new book is a mesmerising encounter with fourteen flying species: from the first fluttering insect of 300 million years ago to the crested pterosaurs of the Mesozoic Era, from hummingbirds that co-evolved with rainforest flowers to the wonders of dragonfly, albatross, pipistrelle and monarch butterfly with which we share the planet today.

Taking Flight is a mind-expanding feat of the imagination, a close encounter with flight in its myriad forms, urging us to look up and drink in the spectacle of these gravity-defying marvels that continue to shape life on Earth.

My Review of Taking Flight

A book exploring the evolution of flight in the natural world.

What I adore about Lev Parikian is his unerring ability to take a complex issue and present it with such good natured, accessible and frequently humorous prose, that the reader learns incredible facts effortlessly. So it is with Taking Flight. From the laugh out loud introduction through the 14 selected examples of flight to the scholarly notes and bibliography, this is Lev Parikian at his best: engaging, educating and entertaining in one brilliant book.

I loved the whole structure of Taking Flight because of the wonderfully crafted hooks that link the end of one chapter to the start of the next, and because of the surprises along the way. Not only was I totally unaware of a tinamous (a bird that can fly but mostly doesn’t often bother) before reading Taking Flight, but I hadn’t expected a chapter on flightless penguins. Of course, you’ll need to read Taking Flight for yourself to see if that chapter is justified.

Taking Flight is packed with information from the first ever bird to the name of the person who came up with the term echolocation, for example, all of which is presented with a lively, conversational tone so that it never feels like an academic text, but rather an entertaining jaunt through evolution, history, the natural world, aviation and science that leaves the reader totally mesmerised and satisfied.

However, for me the greatest enjoyment in reading Taking Flight came from the brilliant observational detail Lev Parikian paints on the page of our current environment and in the insight we gain into him as a person. What the author does is to make it feel as if the reader is standing right next to him and just having a chat. It’s as if you’re there at Bempton Cliffs, or lying on the grass with childhood nursery rhymes going through your head. The effect is that Taking Flight might be teaching us a thing or two, but it feels just like having an old friend at our side. I adored this aspect.

If, like me, you’re not a frequent reader of non-fiction, I think Taking Flight could be just the book to persuade you to read more. It’s elegant as well as accessibly prosaic, it’s beguiling and colourful, and it’s filled with fun and facts. Oh, and those wretched pigeons that wake me up shouting before 5 am are now viewed in an entirely different light thanks to Taking Flight. Cracking book!

About Lev Parikian

Lev Parikian is a writer, birdwatcher and conductor. His book Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? was published by Unbound in 2018. He lives in West London with his family, who are getting used to his increasing enthusiasm for nature. As a birdwatcher, his most prized sightings are a golden oriole in the Alpujarras and a black redstart at Dungeness Power Station.

For more information, follow Lev on Twitter/X @LevParikian or visit his website. You’ll also find him on Facebook and Instagram.