Beyond the Horizon

I've been getting stuck in to Barry Lopez's new book 'Horizon', which is a chunky tome, and an important one.
It has been attracting a lot of attention from reviewers and related journals, including Robert MacFarlane.

Herald Scotland has a good review of the book giving a flavour for its contents.

Even the act of looking up, as a nature-watcher will, and saying “shelduck” or “juncus” or “cumulonimbus” is to impose a human fixity on what should remain a fluid and dynamic field of unnameable possibilities. As soon as the bird is identified, sexed, dated and added to the list, the scene freezes into documentation.
The Atlantic has an excellent review as well.

The Guardian has Robert MacFarlane talking about the book in characteristic style.

From the book:

“One can never, even by paying the strictest attention at multiple levels, entirely comprehend a single place, no matter how many times one might travel there. This is not only because the place itself is constantly changing but because the deep nature of every place is not transparency. It's obscurity."


David Griesing has published an essay.

NPR review is worth reading, as well as this other NPR piece on the book.

Barry Lopez review by Robert MacFarlane

Back in 1986, while training as a teacher in Hull, I went to the University bookshop and noticed a striking book cover, and the title 'Arctic Dreams'. It was a book by the American author Barry Lopez, and it has been one I have re-read many times since.

I have all Lopez's books, and have been waiting for his next 'proper' book for many years. A few years ago, there was an amazing interview with him, which was published here.

I have used some of Lopez's work in my teaching, and also in my work with teachers over the decades.
Lopez finally has a new book out later this month, and Robert MacFarlane has written a review for this weekend's Guardian. It sounds as if it will be worth the wait...

Lopez’s writing throughout this book is pulled taut between his need to register the extreme urgency of the environmental crisis, and his long-held belief in time, patience and the careful observation of other cultures as the basis for a fix: “As time grows short, the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative.

Here are several things you need to do:

1. Get a copy of Arctic Dreams and read it if you haven't.....

2, Order a copy of Horizon...

Watch this to see what I mean....

"If you're going to tell a story, tell a story that helps...."

Exciting news...

Robert MacFarlane's new book, which has been many years in the writing is now scheduled for next May - another book to look forward to next year alongside Barry Lopez's 'Horizon'.

Proofs of Underland arrived today. Good to hold it in hand after nearly seven years' work; the darkest, strangest & deepest book I've written.
The glowing cover is @StanleyDonwood's radioactive 'Nether'.
If you're a reviewer/editor/other who'd like a proof - let us know below. pic.twitter.com/jFhdrbF1rx

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) November 20, 2018

On the Horizon: a new Barry Lopez book

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.