Reading the Irish Landscape, by Frank Mitchell and Michael Ryan (Town House, £18.99)

This revised and extended edition of Frank Mitchell's book of the same title, which was first published in 1986, itself based on a previous book published a decade earlier, and then further revised in 1990, offers an impressively comprehensive study of Ireland in terms of its geological development and subsequent earliest human habitation. Chronologically arranged, the narrative; begins with a detailed exploration and examination of Ireland's geological evolution, including the drama of glacial activity, changing weather patterns and the death of the ancient forests, before moving on to the moment when nature begins to yield to the impact of man. Frank Mitchell's contribution to Irish geology has been immense, nowhere more evident than here, as his vivid account demystifies an extremely complex story. For instance, it becomes possible to follow the Giant Irish Deer from dominance to extinction and later rediscovery as ancient remains during Elizabethan times. In the later chapters, the emphasis swings to archaeology from the Stone. Age to the Norman period, as well as later Irish social history, including modern agriculture and commercial afforestation. Ryan, who has rewritten and extended Mitchell's original archaeological material, is an ideal collaborator, ensuring that a book which was already valuable now becomes, with this new edition, an essential one. Well illustrated, and with good maps, diagrams and comparative photographs, it is also a working text, and vital for anyone interested in Ireland, encapsulating as it does Franks Mitchell's awesome contribution to an understanding of the shaping of Ireland in a geological, archaeological and historical context.