Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways encompasses everything I want in a book: incidents
that propel the mind forward like footsteps, thoughts that arrive with the
inevitability of falling leaves, sentences that stop your eyes with their
beauty, impelling you to pause a moment and sound the words aloud.
The acclaimed author of The Wild Places and Underland examines the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move
Chosen by Slate as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years
In this exquisitely written book, which folds together natural history, cartography, geology, and literature, Robert Macfarlane sets off to follow the ancient routes that crisscross both the landscape of the British Isles and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the voices that haunt old paths and the stories our tracks tell. Macfarlane's journeys take…
When I was young, I wanted
to be Virginia Woolf. I read volumes of her letters, so many that the rhythms
of her sentences seemed to infect my own mind.
Decades later, I decided I would
rather have been her father, Leslie Stephen, author of The Playground of Europe— but only in his mountaineering days,
before he succumbed to his now legendary fits of selfishness and pique.
Strangely enough, Olivia Laing manages to channel both father and daughter in her
intensely ruminative ramble along the River Ouse, where Virginia drowned
herself in 1941.
Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology and folklore.
Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.
In Travels with a Tangerine,
Tim Mackintosh-Smith meanders in the wake of Tangier’s legendary Ibn Battutah, whose wanderlust knew no bounds. As a former resident of
Tangier myself, I have enjoyed this book several times over—and even included
it on the required reading list for a workshop on travel writing.
Each time I
dip into it, I come away astonished by both the depth of his scholarship and
the ease with which he navigates in a freshly complicated world.
In 1325, the great Arab traveler Ibn Battutah set out from his native Tangier in North Africa on pilgrimage to Mecca. By the time he returned nearly thirty years later, he had seen most of the known world, covering three times the distance allegedly traveled by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo—some 75,000 miles in all.
Captivated by Ibn Battutah’s account of his journey, the Arabic scholar and award-winning travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith set out to follow in the peripatetic Moroccan’s footsteps. Traversing Egyptian deserts and remote islands in the Arabian Sea, visiting castles in Syria and innumerable souks in…
In 2018, I traveled more than 1,500 kilometers by horse, camel, kayak, and rowboat through one of the world's most rugged regions and a last, best stronghold for the planet's largest salmonid: the taimen.
Rowing to Baikal is about the fish and wildlife that call the river home. About the human history of the region, from the Bronze Age to the fall of the Soviet Union. About the people who live in the basin now-from nomadic herders to construction engineers—and their attitudes toward development and conservation. About the old gods and legends that haunt the mountains. And about the disparate possible futures for one of the most starkly beautiful places on earth.
