Four Fields

Dee, Tim

ISBN 10: 0224090720 / ISBN 13: 9780224090728

Published by Jonathan Cape, 2013

About this Item

First Edition (London, 2013). No markings or inscriptions. Internally fine. Gentle tanning to the page block Unclipped dust jacket. No tears or conspicuous damage (save for a nick to the top of back inside flap: approx 1mm), light rubbing to the front folds (principally to the top corners, being somewhat heavier to the front corner), else local minor shelf wear only (again, principally to the top corners). Black cloth with bright silver titling to the spine. The boards remain clean, sharp, and fine. 278pp.

Seller Inventory # 5029

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Four Fields
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224090720
• ISBN 13: 9780224090728
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields – walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. Four fields – the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life – looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written. Dee’s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields. Four Fields is a profound, lyrical book by one of Britain’s very best writers about nature. Shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize

About the Author

Tim Dee has been a birdwatcher all his life. His first book, The Running Sky (2009), described his first five birdwatching decades. In the same year he collaborated with the poet Simon Armitage on the anthology The Poetry of Birds. Since then he has written and edited several critically acclaimed books: Four Fields (2013), a study of modern pastoral, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize; Ground Work (as editor, 2017), a collection of new commissioned writing on place by contemporary writers; and most recently, Landfill (2018), a modern nature–junk monograph on gulls and rubbish. He left the BBC in 2018 having worked as a radio producer for nearly thirty years. He lives in three places: in a flat in inner-city Bristol, in a cottage on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens, and in the last-but-one house from the south western tip of Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope.