The Wild Places
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In this eloquent travelogue, Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind) explores the last undomesticated landscapes in Britain and Ireland in a narration that blends history, memoir and meditation. Macfarlane journeys to salt marshes, mountaintops, forests, beaches, constantly expanding and refining his understanding of wildness. Walking a Lake District ridge at night, he observes that with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. Crossing a moor, he finds its vastness and resistance to straight lines of progress analogous to the inability of mere words to convey a landscape's variety and immensity. Nonetheless, Macfarlane's language is as surprising and precise as his environments, with such evocative phrases as heat jellying the air, ice lidded the puddles and descriptions of birds that gild a tree and the sky as a steady tall blue. His striking prose not only evokes each locale's physicality in sensuous, deliberate detail, it glows with a reverence for nature in general and takes the reader on both a geographical and a philosophical journey, as mind-expanding as any of his wild places.
About this Author
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prizewinning books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland . He has contributed to Harper's, Granta, The New Yorker, the Observer (London), the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the London Review of Books. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Reviews
"A formidable consideration by a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence - poetry really - with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas and reach far transcend the physical region he explores . . . the natural world swells with meaning through Macfarlane's devoted observations." - The New York Times Book Review
"Macfarlane delivers crisp, engaging scenes . . . by the end of his peregrinations he had won me over completely." - Anthony Doerr, The Boston Globe
"In this eloquent travelogue, Macfarlane explores the last undomesticated landscapes in Britain and Ireland in a narration that blends history, memoir, and meditation . . . His striking prose not only evokes each locale's physicality in sensuous, deliberate detail, it glows with a reverence for nature in general and takes the reader on both a geographical and a philosophical journey." - Publishers Weekly
"The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature'" -- Scotland on Sunday (UK)
"Sublime... It sets the imagination tingling, laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow'"--Sunday Times (London)
"Read this and it will be impossible to take an unremarkable walk again" --Metro (London)
"He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful" --Antony Gormley, artist
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