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The Wild Places Hardcover – 3 Sept. 2007
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- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGranta Books
- Publication date3 Sept. 2007
- Dimensions16.2 x 20.8 x 4 cm
- ISBN-101862079412
- ISBN-13978-1862079410
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Product description
Review
"Beautiful and inspiring ... a deeply stirring book" -- Independent
"Nature is a passion that Robert Macfarlane puts beautifully into words ... one of the finest nature writers in Britain" -- Scotsman
"The Wild Places is a book that inhales the zeitgeist, as well as the fresh air of open country" -- Guardian
`Macfarlane's style, spare and elegant, combines with an acute eye to produce some wonderful writing'
-- TLS, Patrick Curry
`Such lovely honeyed prose. Macfarlane is delightful literary company, polite, earnest, erudite and wide-ranging in his interests.'
-- LRB, Kathleen Jamie
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Granta Books; Third Impression edition (3 Sept. 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1862079412
- ISBN-13 : 978-1862079410
- Dimensions : 16.2 x 20.8 x 4 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 303,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 1,018 in Popular Maths
- 1,534 in Higher Education on Geography
- 1,728 in Scientist Biographies
- Customer reviews:
About the author
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Top reviews from United Kingdom
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“From the bottom of the hill, I could hear the noise of the trees with the wind; a marine roar that grew in volume as I approached. Looking up at the swaying wood, I remembered something that I had read: when you see a wood or a forest, you must imagine the ground almost as a mirror line, because a tree’s subterranean root system can spread nearly as widely as its aerial crown. For the visible canopy of each tree you have to imagine an inverted hidden one, yearning for water just as its twin yearns for light.”
“Once, emerging from a high-hedged lane, I put up a flock of white doves from a brown field, and watched as they rose applauding into the sky.”
“Lines of spider’s silk criss-crossed the air in their scores, and light ran like drops of bright liquid down them when we moved. In the windless warm air, groups of black flies bobbed and weaved, each dancing around a set point, like vibrating atoms held in a matrix. I had the sense of being in the nave of a church: the joined vaulting of the trees above, the stone sides of the cutting which were cold when I laid a hand against them, the spindles of sunlight, the incantations of the flies.”
“Coleridge once compared walking at night in his part of the Lake District to a newly blind man feeling the face of a child: the same loving attention, the same deduction by form and shape, the same familiar unfamiliarity. At night, new orders of connection assert themselves: sonic, olfactory, tactile. The sensorium is transformed. Associations swarm out of the darkness. You become even more aware of landscape as a medley of effects, a mingling of geology, memory, movement, life. The landforms remain, but they exist as presences: inferred, less substantial, more powerful. You inhabit a new topology. Out at night, you not only understand that wildness is not only a permanent property of land – it is also a quality which can settle on a place, with a snowfall, or with the close of day.”
Read, and find yourself wanting to begin your own journey.
Ultimately, nature is best seen and experienced for yourself rather than read in a book which is a hurdle outdoor writing will always find hard to overcome. Nevertheless, Robert does a fantastic job and you will spend the whole time reading it and long after aching to visit these places.
Robert Macfarlane is an extraordinary writer. He manages to write very lyrical prose without going over the top. He writes take-your-breath-away sentences that enhance, rather than detract from, his more straightforward prose.
The Wild Places chronicles his search for wild places in the British Isles, where some believe there are no wild places left. As Macfarlane seeks out and visits these wild places, he examines our relationship with the places. Almost everywhere he goes, there is evidence or stores of the people who have been there before him. At the same time, he starts to see the wild in the most unlikely of places, appearing in the cracks, crevices and forgotten spaces of our built environment.
In the end, his journey fundamentally changes his idea of what a "wild place" is.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. I'll certainly be reading Macfarlane's other books.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Canada on 28 July 2022
The descriptions are flawless, the prose crafted like a jewelled watch, and the vocabulary, oh the vocabulary - what a joy to read such a well-educated writer who really knows his stuff.
I will restrain myself a while and then re-read it and the others. Then next year again for sure.
Don't miss this if you love fine writing.