Download or read book Mountains of the Mind written by Robert Macfarlane and published by Granta. This book was released on 2009-07-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD Once we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride. In this ground-breaking, classic work, Robert Macfarlane takes us up into the mountains: to experience their shattering beauty, the fear and risk of adventure, and to explore the strange impulses that have for centuries lead us to the world's highest places.
Download or read book The Wild Places written by Robert Macfarlane and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-06-24 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Old Ways and Underland, an "eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we're laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth's surface." --Bill McKibben Winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and a finalist for the Orion Book Award Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago's most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance.
Download or read book Underland A Deep Time Journey written by Robert Macfarlane and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller • New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year” • NPR “Favorite Books of 2019” • Guardian “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” • Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award From the best-selling, award-winning author of Landmarks and The Old Ways, a haunting voyage into the planet’s past and future. Hailed as "the great nature writer of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), Robert Macfarlane is the celebrated author of books about the intersections of the human and the natural realms. In Underland, he delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestseller The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through “deep time”—the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present—he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk “hiding place” where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. Woven through Macfarlane’s own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the underland made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls “the awful darkness within the world.” Global in its geography and written with great lyricism and power, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. Taking a deep-time view of our planet, Macfarlane here asks a vital and unsettling question: “Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?” Underland marks a new turn in Macfarlane’s long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart. From its remarkable opening pages to its deeply moving conclusion, it is a journey into wonder, loss, fear, and hope. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.
Download or read book Landmarks written by Robert Macfarlane and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2016 Landmarks is Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it. Praise for Robert Macfarlane: 'He has a poet's eye and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy' John Banville, Observer "I'll read anything Macfarlane writes" David Mitchell, Independent 'Every movement needs stars. In [Macfarlane] we surely have one, burning brighter with each book.' Telegraph '[Macfarlane] is a godfather of a cultural moment' Sunday Times
Download or read book Mountains of the Mind written by Robert Macfarlane and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-09-09 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The basis for the new documentary film, Mountain: A Breathtaking Voyage into the Extreme. Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert McFarlane reveals how the mystery of the world’s highest places has came to grip the Western imagination—and perennially draws legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes. His story begins three centuries ago, when mountains were feared as the forbidding abodes of dragons and other mysterious beasts. In the mid-1700s the attentions of both science and poetry sparked a passion for mountains; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lord Byron extolled the sublime experiences to be had on high; and by 1924 the death on Mt Everest of an Englishman named George Mallory came to symbolize the heroic ideals of his day. Macfarlane also reflects on fear, risk, and the shattering beauty of ice and snow, the competition and contemplation of the climb, and the strange alternate reality of high altitude, magically enveloping us in the allure of mountains at every level.
Download or read book The Old Ways written by Robert Macfarlane and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of The Wild Places and Underland, an exploration of walking and thinking In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. His walks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird islands of the Scottish northwest, from Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he crosses paths with walkers of many kinds—wanderers, pilgrims, guides, and artists. Above all this is a book about walking as a journey inward and the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move. Macfarlane discovers that paths offer not just a means of traversing space, but of feeling, knowing, and thinking.
Download or read book Ninety Degrees North written by Fergus Fleming and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Barrow’s Boys offers a fascinating look at the exploration of the Arctic in the nineteenth century. Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, the Seattle Times, Publishers Weekly, and Time In the nineteenth century, theories about the North Pole ran rampant. Was it an open sea? Was it a portal to new worlds within the globe? Or was it just a wilderness of ice? When Sir John Franklin disappeared in the Arctic in 1845, explorers decided it was time to find out. In scintillating detail, Ninety Degrees North tells of the vying governments (including the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) and fantastic eccentrics (from Swedish balloonists to Italian aristocrats) who, despite their heroic failures, often achieved massive celebrity as they battled shipwreck, starvation, and sickness to reach the top of the world. Drawing on unpublished archives and long-forgotten journals, Fergus Fleming recounts this riveting saga of humankind’s search for the ultimate goal with consummate craftsmanship and wit. “Barely a page goes by without the loss of a crew member or a body part . . . Fleming [is] a marvelous teller of tales—and a superb thumbnail biographer.” —The Observer “A fable of men driven to extremes by the lust for knowledge as epic as a Greek myth.” —Time
Download or read book The Living Mountain written by Nan Shepherd and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2011-08-18 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.
Download or read book Silt written by Robert Macfarlane and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-03-20 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Silt, bestselling travel writer Robert Macfarlane walks the Broomway, the deadliest path in Britain. In one of the most striking chapters of his brilliant 2012 book The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane walks the Essex offshore path which has claimed the lives of more than sixty people over the centuries. His companion on this atmospheric and potentially perilous journey is his old friend and photographer, David Quentin. In this special e-book edition, the Broomway section of The Old Ways appears alongside a run of twenty-two photographs taken that day by David, which form a haunting counterpoint to the text itself. In a newly written afterword, David reflects on the walk, on Robert Macfarlane's writing and on the fascinating legal terrain which paths like this one traverse even as they cross the land itself. Praise for The Old Ways: 'Macfarlane has shown how utterly beautiful a brilliantly written travel book can still be. As perfect as his now classic The Wild Places. Maybe it is even better than that' William Dalrymple, Observer 'A lovely book, a poetic investigation into what it is to follow a path, on land and at sea, in the footsteps of both our ancient predecessors and such writers as Edward Thomas: Macfarlane is reviving an entire body of nature writing here' David Sexton, Evening Standard 'Beautifully written, moving, thrilling. It reminded me of how much stranger and richer the world is... at walking speed' Philip Pullman, Guardian 'A magnificent meditation on walking and writing. An astonishingly haunted book' Adam Nicolson, Daily Telegraph 'The Old Ways sets the imagination tingling . . . it is like reading a prose Odyssey sprinkled with imagist poems' John Carey, Sunday Times Robert Macfarlane is the author of the award-winning Mountains of the Mind; The Wild Places; The Old Ways, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction; and Landmarks, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. David Quentin is a barrister specialising in tax law. He also takes photographs, teaches Cambridge undergraduates about versification and plays the bass guitar in London-based krautgoth noisegaze outfit The Murder Act.
Download or read book Afghanistan written by Bob McKerrow and published by India Research Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This personal account of war-torn Afghanistan conveys the spirit of the Afghan people and the beauty of the landscape through the perspective of an international Red Cross worker. Photographs and writings depict the brutality of war, poverty, and land mines against the backdrop of the towering mountains that have inspired generations of indigenous artisans, including carpet makers, artists, and poets. Both the character of the aid worker and the Afghan spirit are artistically rendered in this thoughtful, affecting chronicle.
Download or read book At the Mountains of Madness written by H. P. Lovecraft and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Initially rejected by Lovecraft's publisher, 'At The Mountains of Madness' is now considered a classic of the horror genre. The disturbing, nightmarish story of a journey through Antarctica and a discovery of secrets hidden in a frozen mountain range has influenced writers and film-makers for decades.
Download or read book Hunger Mountain written by David Hinton and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Come along with David Hinton on a series of walks through the wild beauty of Hunger Mountain, near his home in Vermont—excursions informed by the worldview he’s imbibed from his many years translating the classics of Chinese poetry and philosophy. His broad-ranging discussion offers insight on everything from the mountain landscape to the origins of consciousness and the Cosmos, from geology to Chinese landscape painting, from parenting to pictographic oracle-bone script, to a family chutney recipe. It’s a spiritual ecology that is profoundly ancient and at the same time resoundingly contemporary. Your view of the landscape—and of your place in it—may never be the same.
Download or read book East of the Mountains written by David Guterson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Dr Ben Givens left his Seattle home he never intended to return. It was to be a journey past snow-covered mountains to a place of canyons, sagelands and orchards, where, on the verges of the Columbia River, Ben had entered the world and would now take his leave of it.
Download or read book Reading the Mountains of Home written by John Elder and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small farms once occupied the heights that John Elder calls home, but now only a few cellar holes and tumbled stone walls remain among the dense stands of maple, beech, and hemlocks on these Vermont hills. Reading the Mountains of Homeis a journey into these verdant reaches where in the last century humans tried their hand and where bear and moose now find shelter. As John Elder is our guide, so Robert Frost is Elder's companion, his great poem "Directive" seeing us through a landscape in which nature and literature, loss and recovery, are inextricably joined. Over the course of a year, Elder takes us on his hikes through the forested uplands between South Mountain and North Mountain, reflecting on the forces of nature, from the descent of the glaciers to the rush of the New Haven River, that shaped a plateau for his village of Bristol; and on the human will that denuded and farmed and abandoned the mountains so many years ago. His forays wind through the flinty relics of nineteenth-century homesteads and Abenaki settlements, leading to meditations on both human failure and the possibility for deeper communion with the land and others. An exploration of the body and soul of a place, an interpretive map of its natural and literary life, Reading the Mountains of Home strikes a moving balance between the pressures of civilization and the attraction of wilderness. It is a beautiful work of nature writing in which human nature finds its place, where the reader is invited to follow the last line of Frost's "Directive," to "Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."
Download or read book The High Mountains of Portugal written by Yann Martel and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Fifteen years after The Life of Pi, Yann Martel is taking us on another long journey. Fans of his Man Booker Prize–winning novel will recognize familiar themes from that seafaring phenomenon, but the itinerary in this imaginative new book is entirely fresh. . . . Martel’s writing has never been more charming.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that—if he can find it—would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe’s earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure. Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomás’s quest. Fifty years on, a Canadian senator takes refuge in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, grieving the loss of his beloved wife. But he arrives with an unusual companion: a chimpanzee. And there the century-old quest will come to an unexpected conclusion. The High Mountains of Portugal—part quest, part ghost story, part contemporary fable—offers a haunting exploration of great love and great loss. Filled with tenderness, humor, and endless surprise, it takes the reader on a road trip through Portugal in the last century—and through the human soul. Praise for The High Mountains of Portugal “Just as ambitious, just as clever, just as existential and spiritual [as Life of Pi] . . . a book that rewards your attention . . . an excellent book club choice.”—San Francisco Chronicle “There’s no denying the simple pleasures to be had in The High Mountains of Portugal.”—Chicago Tribune “Charming . . . Most Martellian is the boundless capacity for parable. . . . Martel knows his strengths: passages about the chimpanzee and his owner brim irresistibly with affection and attentiveness.”—The New Yorker “A rich and rewarding experience . . . [Martel] spins his magic thread of hope and despair, comedy and pathos.”—USA Today “I took away indelible images from High Mountains, enchanting and disturbing at the same time. . . . As whimsical as Martel’s magic realism can be, grief informs every step of the book’s three journeys. In the course of the novel we burrow ever further into the heart of an ape, pure and threatening at once, our precursor, ourselves.”—NPR “Refreshing, surprising and filled with sparkling moments of humor and insight.”—The Dallas Morning News “We’re fortunate to have brilliant writers using their fiction to meditate on a paradox we need urgently to consider—the unbridgeable gap and the unbreakable bond between human and animal, our impossible self-alienation from our world.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian “[Martel packs] his inventive novel with beguiling ideas. What connects an inept curator to a haunted pathologist to a smitten politician across more than seventy-five years is the author’s ability to conjure up something uncanny at the end.”—The Boston Globe “A fine home, and story, in which to find oneself.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
Download or read book Ghostways Two Journeys in Unquiet Places written by Robert Macfarlane and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hauntingly beautiful diptych of works inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s travels with celebrated collaborators to two eerie corners of England. In Holloway, "a perfect miniature prose-poem" (William Dalrymple), Macfarlane, artist Stanley Donwood, and writer Dan Richards travel to Dorset, near the south coast of England, to explore a famed "hollowed way"—a path used by walkers and riders for so many centuries that it has become worn far down into the soft golden bedrock of the region. In Ness, "a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age" (Max Porter), Macfarlane and Donwood create a modern myth about Orford Ness, the ten-mile-long shingle spit that lies off the coast of East Anglia, which the British government used for decades to conduct secret weapons tests.
Download or read book The Call of the Mountains written by Max Landsberg and published by Luath Press Ltd. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An adventure across a thousand miles of Scotland's mountains. In this personal guide to the triumphs, hardships and perils of scaling the Munros, Landsberg brings the joys and pitfalls of hill-climbing to life. Landsberg's adventures are presented in vivid detail, with insights ranging from encompassing the wonder of unique experiences like seeing the birth of a deer to the mundane delight of the flavour of sandwich he had on a given day. Throughout his account, Landsberg provides an in-depth insight into his growing obsession with climbing the Munroes and its effect on his physical, emotional and spiritual development. With insights on the history, culture, ecology and geology of Scotland's mountains and guides to Gaelic place names, mountain safety and an analysis the science of walking, this book provides a complete guide for anyone looking for adventure in the Highlands, and is sure to inspire anyone who reads it to go climb a rock! Excerpt: One day I walked into these mountains, and I never came all the way back. For though Scotland's mountains may not be the highest in the world, they are certainly amongst the most awe-inspiring and enchanting. From the towering pinnacles of Skye, to the high rolling plateau of the Cairngorms; from the bonnie braes of Ben Lomond to the weeping cliffs of Glencoe; from the rocky battlements that encircle Loch Arkaig, to the gentle folds of Ben Lawers as it spills down to Loch Tay: here are offered scenes of unrivalled splendour, landscapes of unparalleled variety, and a magic ground for personal connection, inspiration, and transformation. These are places of accessible adventure - we leave behind the safety of the lush glen to cross the swooping moor, clamber up through craggy corridors, and with silver chuckling burn then spatey cascade as our sometime guide we reach at last the grand summits of these lands. Here beneath a hundred rainbows lie a hundred pots of gold - unclaimed scenic ingots that are yours for the taking and to which I hope to lead you, on a journey for body, for mind, and perhaps for something deeper.
