"Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar." This advice, given to a father whose daughter wants to learn to write, is the organizing principle behind Barry Lopez's latest collection of essays and also the central theme behind his life as a writer. Author of 12 acclaimed books of nature writing, including the National Book Award-winning
Arctic Dreams, Lopez is one of our most eloquent masters of the nearly lost art of paying
attention. In this volume, a travelogue of journeys both inward and outward, he brings the same careful scrutiny to bear on the mystery of his own life and its interactions with the natural world.
Lopez has always been interested in tearing down artificial divides between nature and culture, landscape and identity, and nowhere does he do so more powerfully than in About This Life. These essays cover ground from the remote (in the group of travel essays entitled "Out of Country") to the familiar ("Indwelling"), the personal to the archetypal ("Remembrance" and "An Opening Quartet"). Whether he's joyriding around the world with air cargo, performing burials for animals found dead by the side of the road, or lamenting the commodification of the American landscape, Lopez writes with a surgeon's precision, a musician's ear, and a painter's eye for beauty found in unexpected places.
The acclaimed National Book Award winner gives us his first major work of nonfiction in a decade: a collection of spellbinding new essays which, read together, form a jigsaw-puzzle portrait of an extraordinary man.
From the publication of his bestselling Of Wolves and Men and the astonishing originality of Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez established himself as that rare writer whose every book is an event, both with critics and among his enormous readership. In About This Life he assembles essays of great wisdom and insight: far-flung travel (remote Hokkaido Island in Japan; the Galįpagos) and naturalist provocations (why do we deprive people with intimate knowledge of the land -- small farmers, Indians, native Hawaiians, cowboys -- of political power?); pure adventure (a dizzying series of around-the-world journeys with air freight -- everything from penguins to pianos); as well as never-before-published Rilkesque memory pieces that represent his most personal work to date.
A book at once vastly erudite yet intimate, a magically written work by a major writer at the top of his form.