Brute absence

May’s theme is the letter “M”. First books off the bookshelf are about mammoths and moths. In Mammoth (Fourth Estate, £7.99), Richard Stone is happy about cloning if it will restore his beloved beasts to life and assuage that “brute absence”, as reviewer Stephen Baxter put it. Baxter did warn that “unrealistic technocratic fantasies about resurrecting the mammoths themselves seem misguided”. And despite detecting occasional irrelevancies, Roy Herbert liked Judith Hooper’s “marvellous tale” Of Moths and Men (Fourth Estate, £8.99): “a fascinating story in itself, but it is also bedecked with the vicious quarrels of scientists, their political jockeying, childish sulks and cruelties”.…