Horizon /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019Edition: First editionDescription: 572 pagesContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780394585826
- 0394585828
- 813/.54 B 23
- PS3562.O67 H67 2019
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Nonfiction | Coeur d'Alene Library | Book | 910.4 LOPEZ (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610021648030 | |||
Standard Loan | Hayden Library Adult Biography | Hayden Library | Book | LOPEZ-LOPEZ (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610022080068 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
THE NEW YORK TIMES * NPR * THE GUARDIAN
From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author's 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.
Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity's thirst for exploration, 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. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- Author's Note (p. xiii)
- Prologue (p. 3)
- Introduction: Looking for a Ship (p. 7)
- 1 Mamaroneck (p. 9)
- 2 To Go/To See (p. 17)
- 3 Remember (p. 29)
- 4 Talismans (p. 34)
- Cape Foulweather (p. 49)
- Coast of Oregon
- Eastern Shore of the North Pacific Ocean
- Western North America
- Skraeling Island (p. 131)
- Mouth of Alexandra Fjord
- East Coast of Ellesmere Island
- Nunavut
- Canada
- Puerto Ayora (p. 205)
- Isla Santa Cruz
- Archipiélago de Colón
- Eastern Equatorial Pacific
- Jackal Camp (p. 267)
- Turkwel River Basin
- Western Lake Turkana Uplands
- Eastern Equatorial Africa
- Port Arthur to Botany Bay (p. 345)
- State of Tasmania
- Northern Shore of the Southern Ocean
- Southeastern Australia
- State of New South Wales
- Western Shore of the South Pacific
- Graves Nunataks to Port Famine Road (p. 425)
- Queen Maud Mountains
- Central Transantarctic Mountains
- Northern Edge of the Polar Plateau
- Antarctica
- Brunswick Peninsula
- Shore of the Strait of Magellan
- Southern Chile
- Notes (p. 513)
- Selected Bibliography (p. 519)
- Scientific Binomials (p. 531)
- Overview Maps (p. 539)
- Acknowledgments (p. 545)
- Index (p. 551)
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Lopez is a natural philosopher in an almost literal sense, sharing his observations on the natural world and how different cultures have made sense of it and one another. His ruminations take us on a peripatetic journey around the globe and across the sweep of time with major sections of the book set on the Antarctic ice, the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, a small island in the Canadian arctic, the Galapagos, Australia, and the coast of Oregon. Each setting provides the fodder for a discursive meditation on his personal travels, the landscape and local ecology, humankind's impact on the environment, and the painful effects of histories of colonialization on indigenous populations. A recurrent theme is the role of elders in a culture, not as mere repositories of institutional knowledge but as nonlinear thinkers who draw on their cultural past to see new ways of solving problems based on empathic listening and letting go of assumptions. VERDICT While not a memoir or travelog, this first-person account is ideal for anyone who likes nature writing that also manages to bring philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history to bear with a personal guide. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/18.]-Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of -Toledo Lib. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
A globe-trotting nature writer meditates on the fraught interactions between people and ecosystems in this sprawling environmentalist travelogue. Essayist Lopez (Arctic Dreams) recounts episodes from decades of his travels, most of them tied to scientific investigations: camping on the Oregon coast while considering the exploits of British explorer James Cook; examining archaeological sites in the high Arctic while reflecting on the harshness of life there; hunting for hominin fossils in Kenya while weighing human evolution; scuba-diving under an Antarctic ice shelf while observing the rich marine biota. His free-associative essays blend vivid reportage on landscapes, wildlife, and the knotty relationships among the scientists he accompanies with larger musings on natural history, environmental and climate crises, and the sins of Western imperialism in erasing indigenous cultures. It's often hard to tell where Lopez is going with his frequent digressions: one two-page section skitters from global cancer rates past a one-eyed goshawk he once saw in Namibia to an astrophysics experiment at the South Pole to detect dark matter, with no particular conclusion. Still, his prose is so evocative-during a tempest at sea, "veils of storm-ripped water ballooned in the air around us" amid "the high-pitched mewling of albatrosses, teetering impossibly forty feet away from us on the wind"-and his curiosity so infectious that readers will be captivated. Photos. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As a preternaturally curious boy subjected to coast-to-coast upheavals, Lopez dreamed of traveling the world, and travel he has, with serious intent, to 70 countries, becoming, along the way, a much-lauded writer of conscience who illuminates the nexus between natural and human history. In his most encompassing, autobiographical, passionately detailed, and reflective book, a life's travelogue, he shares memories, stories, observations, concerns, condemnations, and hope. Prodigiously attentive out in the world and rigorous on the page, morally inquisitive and bracingly candid, Lopez pegs this expansive narrative to places that have special resonance for him, beginning with Oregon's Cape Foulweather, so named by Captain James Cook. Lopez visits archaeological sites in the Canadian High Arctic, takes measure of environmental pressures on the Galápagos Islands, participates in fieldwork in East Equatorial Africa, studies penal colonies in Australia, and searches for meteorites in Antarctica. Each place on Earth goes deep, writes Lopez, as does he. Sharply attuned to the wonders and decimation of the living world, the endless assaults against indigenous people, and the daunting challenges of a changing climate, Lopez tells revelatory tales, poses tough questions, and shares wisdom, all while looking to the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 BooklistKirkus Book Review
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations."Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another." So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galpagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, "unlike mefelt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning." The author's chapter on talismansobjects taken from his travels, such as "a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite"is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli's Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he'd met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years' worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, "we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes."Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
Barry Lopez, the author of 13 books, lives in western Oregon.(Bowker Author Biography)
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