Field Notes; The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren

Lopez, Barry

ISBN 10: 0679434534 / ISBN 13: 9780679434535

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994

About this Item

Signed by author on half-title. DJ has slight wear and soiling. In this collection of twelve stories, Barry Lopez-the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams and one of our most admired writers-evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another, with the past, and with nature. An anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain always disturbingly unknowable. A successful financial consultant, failing to discover his roots in Africa, jogs from Connecticut to the Pacific Ocean in order to forge an indigenous connection to the American landscape. A paleontologist is haunted by visions of wildlife in a vacant lot in Manhattan. In simple, crystalline prose, Lopez evokes a sense of the magic and marvelous strangeness of the world, and a deep compassion for the human predicament. Barry Holstun Lopez (born January 6, 1945) is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist.Lopez was born in Port Chester, New York and raised in Southern California and New York City. He attended the University of Notre Dame, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees there in 1966 and 1968. He also attended New York University and the University of Oregon. His essays, short stories, reviews and opinion pieces began appearing in 1966. Until 1981, he was also a landscape photographer. He regularly collaborates with other artists and writers and is active in national and international efforts toward reconciliation. He has traveled to nearly 80 countries and in 2002 was elected a Fellow of the Explorers Club.Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity. First Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Bookseller Inventory # 72597

Bibliographic Details

Title: Field Notes; The Grace Note of the Canyon ...

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York

Publication Date: 1994

Binding: Hardcover

Book Condition: Very good

Dust Jacket Condition: very good

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

In this new collection of twelve stories, one of our most admired writers evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another, with the past. with nature. In these stories, we find men or women -- sometimes at odds with themselves, sometimes transcendently well grounded -- who have an experience that is profound, unsettling, and oddly liberating. In "Empira's Tapestry." a gravely ill woman begins to weave a luminous cloth in which is expressed all of the fervent desire she had for her life ... In "Homecoming," a botanist has become so caught up with his academic ambitions that he forgets the names of the wildflowers in his own woods until his young daughter re-teaches him ... And in "The Entreaty of the Wiideema," an anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain for him always disturbingly unknowable.

These spare, haunting fictions, building cumulatively on each other, are marked by those qualities we have found in all of Barry Lopez's writing: a sense of the magic and marvelous strangeness of the world, respect for disparate ways of knowing and being, compassion for the human predicament, and a vibrant hope that comes from being alert and attentive to the complex beauties of landscape.

Field Votes is the final book of a loosely connected trilogy that includes Desert Notes (1976) and River Notes (1979) and stands with the best of Barry Lopez's remarkably varied work.

About the Author:

Barry Lopez won the 1986 National Book Award in nonfiction for Arctic Dreams. His short stories, which have received a Pushcart Prize and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. appear regularly in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction. The North American Review Manoa, and elsewhere. His other books include Of Wolves and Men, Winter Count, Crossing Open Ground, and Crow and Weasel.