have just read ‘The Diversity of Sri Lankan Wildlife’ by Jayantha Jayewardene. My library at home is full of tomes from all over the world on the natural world and its wild and beautiful things
I think I can say that I have never laid eyes on such a comprehensive and well laid out work on the wildlife of Sri Lanka. It is simply magnificent – a book that can grace any library of definitive works. What a marvellous anthology of photographs and hand drawn illustrations.
Its most impressive quality is its scholarship and erudition on the subject matter. It is presented in such a way that the young generations in whose hands the responsibility of looking after the wild world of our planet will lie in the future, can find clear and well informed particulars and insights that are not mere generalisations, but are technically and contextually accurate. There can be no better way for them to arm themselves with a torch that lights up the corners of ignorance that so often leads to travesties in future wildlife management.
Jayantha Jayewardene is truly a man for the future. In this work he has bequeathed a legacy of enormous benefit not just to Sri Lanka but to all the millions out there in our world who seek an incentive through knowledge to work for the preservation of those worthy things that are tacitly in the charge of humankind.
I salute him and his achievement. The book is available at Vijitha Yapa Bookshops, Odel, Barefoot and Sarasavi Bookshops.
Book facts: The Diversity of Sri Lankan Wildlife by Jayantha Jayewardene. Reviewed by Nigel Kerner - Sunday Times
