Landmarks - Softcover

Macfarlane, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241982200 ISBN 13: 9780241982204

Publisher: Penguin, 2017

Synopsis

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. This paperback book has 438 pages and measures: 19.7 x 12.8 x 2.7cm

About this title

Review

Publisher's description. The number one bestselling book from the author of The Old Ways. This is a celebration of the special relationship between language and place, a field guide to nature writers from Roger Deakin to Nan Shepherd, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable, poetic, funny, peculiar and endangered words to describe the natural world. (Penguin)

Thoughtful and lyrical writing . . . It's gorgeous (Katy Guest Independent on Sunday)

Enormously pleasurable, deeply moving . . . Landmarks is both a bid to save our rich hoard of landscape language, and a blow struck for the power of a deep creative relationship to place (Financial Times)

His writing has a confidence and enjoyment, a passionate purpose . . . he celebrates our vast, but evaporating, vocabulary for the landscape

(Daily Telegraph)

A story like this is salutary...Landmarks is a book that ought to be read by policymakers, educators, armchair environmentalists and active conservationists the world over. (Guardian)

The writing is full of clarity and internal reflections and the chapters ripple over into each other like a linked chain of mountain pools.... What is remarkable about these words is how precise they are, and how deeply local. They feel as if they somehow grew out of the land itself. A delight. (Sunday Times Magazine)

The mood is one of celebration... [Landmarks is] the product of an active academic intelligence and emotional generosity, irradiated by a profound sense of wonder... Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly (Independent)

About the Author

Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award. Both books have been adapted for television by the BBC. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times. His most recent book is The Lost Words, a spell-book for adults and children alike, illustrated by Jackie Morris.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0241982200
• ISBN 13: 9780241982204
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448