Possibly my favourite author of all time is Barry Lopez.He writes about the natural world better than anyone else. He hasn't had a book published for some years now, and has also sadly been having health issues. The last time I blogged about him, was on the publication of a wonderful interview piece where he talked about his plans for this book, and which was a catalyst for a change in my thinking about my teaching.
It is described as being: “about geography, and various arrangements of space and time, that create hope or destroy hope.” An “autobiography of a journey,” as he calls it.
This latest book, which is called 'Horizon' is published in March 2019, and I am so excited to read it.
Here is the description on Amazon.
From the National Book Award-winning author of the now-classic Arctic Dreams, a vivid, poetic, capacious work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters--human, animal, and natural--that have shaped an extraordinary life.
Taking us nearly from pole to pole--from modern megacities to some of the most remote regions on the earth--and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez, hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as "one of our finest writers," gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that moves indelibly, immersively, through his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.
As he takes us on these myriad travels, Lopez also probes the long history of humanity's quests and explorations, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today's ecotourists in the tropics. Throughout his journeys--to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe--and via friendships he forges along the way with scientists, archaeologists, artists and local residents, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.
Horizon is a revelatory, epic work that voices concern and frustration along with humanity and hope--a book that makes you see the world differently, and that is the crowning achievement by one of America's great thinkers and most humane voices.
This is a book of hope it seems, in a world that needs it more than ever.
Here's an interview with Bill Moyers from 2011
Bill Moyers Journal: Barry Lopez from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
And here's Robert MacFarlane on the impact of Lopez on his work.
Check out Home Ground too: the perfect dictionary of landforms for geographers and now available in a new paperback edition.
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