Horizon
| Category: | Book |
| By (author): | Lopez, Barry |
| Subject: | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs |
| NATURE / Ecosystems & Habitats / General | |
| NATURE / Essays | |
| SCIENCE / Natural History | |
| Awards: | Banff Mountain Book Festival Award (2019) Short-listed |
| Publisher: | Knopf Random Vintage Canada |
| Published: | January 2020 |
| Format: | Book-paperback |
| Pages: | 592 |
| Size: | 8.00in x 5.18in |
- Our Price:
- $ 21.00
- Availability:
- In stock
Additional Notes
| From The Publisher* | From the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams, a masterwork in which he recounts the travels around the world and the encounters--human, animal, and natural--that have shaped his extraordinary life. Barry Lopez gives us his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date, a book Robert Macfarlane calls "magnificent; a contemprary epic, at once pained and urgent, personal and oracular." Horizon moves through the author's travels in 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. Lopez moves from the fine details to the large, probing the 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--Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world. In a revelatory work that voices concern and frustration along with humanity and hope, Lopez helps you see the world differently, through the crowning achievement of one of America's great thinkers and most humane voices. |
| Review Quote* | Finalist for the 2019 Banff Mountain Book Festival: Adventure Travel Category "Horizon is magnificent; a contemporary epic, at once pained and urgent, personal and oracular. . . . This is a book to which one must learn to listen. . . . [Lopez] has given us a grave, sorrowful, beautiful book, thirty-five years in the writing but still speaking to the present moment." -The Guardian "Lopez writes with fervid wonder and fascination about all he's seen and experienced . . . gripped by an urgency to tell ‘a coherent and meaningful story' about the threat of humanity's extinction as a result of climate change. . . . [Horizon] makes any travel writing that doesn't share Lopez's sense of responsibility and purpose seem derelict by comparison." -The Atlantic "[Horizon] reflects on a lifetime of travel and exploration to some of the most extreme places on earth. . . . Lopez is a masterful writer, able to mix history and science with personal observation in a wonderful way. Of course, with so much of our world in imminent danger, his message about our place in a damaged world is particularly timely." -rabble.ca "Barry Lopez is a straight-up magnificent writer. To read Horizon is to be transported to wondrous landscapes far beyond the pale, and thereby obtain an astounding perspective on our increasingly uncertain future. Lopez expresses faith that our species can avert annihilation by investing ‘more deeply in the philosopher's cardinal virtues': courage, justice, reverence, and compassion-virtues this book possesses in abundance." -Jon Krakauer "A huge-hearted, wise and sorrowful book by the Philosopher-King of Gaia. A masterpiece." -Joy Williams "Riveting, seductive, and beautifully written. I don't know of any other writer who so mesmerizingly, so seemingly effortlessly, weaves together art, science and poetry-I found myself underlining sentences on every page. Barry Lopez is one of my literary heroes." -Andrea Wulf "An essential voice in American writing. Barry Lopez's stories of inquiry and discovery are gloriously riveting, bringing the reader into a research boat, an archaeological site, a night-tent conversation, water forty feet under the edge of an ice shelf. At each place where he turns his eye and mind, something is learned of existence's richness and meaning. A master work. This book is a map to treasures everywhere buried." -Jane Hirshfield "Nobody journeys like Barry Lopez. He's humble, he's ethical, he's honest, he's curious, he's doubtful, he's properly sad and he's wild. He wakes us up to the worth and the mystery of the world. His great affection for humanity comes up from every patch of earth he visits. This is an epic book that goes from pole to pole, and yet manages to make a distinct ‘everywhere' out of each little patch he visits. A glorious book, gloriously told." -Colum McCann "A celebration and investigation of the impulse to explore, Horizon is itself an exploration-of both the human and inhuman worlds. In his intensity, his clarity, and his capacity for wonder, Barry Lopez is unmatched." -Elizabeth Kolbert "The world is vast, and so are the heart and the curiosity of Barry Lopez. His voice is incomparable and necessary. No one else alive, to my knowledge, thinks so carefully about the moral dimensions of landscape." -David Quammen "A winning memoir . . . Lopez has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galapagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world . . . The author's chapter on talismans-objects 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. . . . Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "No one has worked harder to make sense of our present civilization than Barry Lopez, and in these chronicles we get to share the travels that helped shape his extraordinary mind and heart. A great gift to us all." -Bill McKibben |
| Biographical Note | BARRY LOPEZ is the author of two collections of essays; several story collections; Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist; and Crow and Weasel, a novella-length fable. He contributes regularly to both American and foreign journals and has traveled to more than seventy countries to conduct research. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundations and has been honored by a number of institutions for his literary, humanitarian, and environmental work. |