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The Wild Places

Robert Macfarlane - Author

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ISBN 9781440638657 | 352 pages | 24 Jun 2008 | Penguin | 8.26 x 5.23in | 18 - AND UP
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“An eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we’re laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth’s surface.”
—Bill McKibben


Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago’s most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance. A unique travelogue that will intrigue readers of natural history and adventure, The Wild Places solidifies Macfarlane’s reputation as a young writer to watch.

“A formidable consideration by a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence – poetry, really – with the breathless ease of a master angler, a writer whose ideas and reach transcend the physical region he explores…the natural world swells with meaning through Macfarlane’s devoted observations, which can be both minutely detailed and vast in scope…like the wild it parses, [this book] quietly returns us to ourselves.”
The New York Times Book Review

“Inspiring…Macfarlane brings these landscapes to pulsing life…His precision in apprehending the world is a salutary lesson in and of itself…His descriptions have created a new map of Britain and Ireland in my mind. And like pebbles in a pond, those descriptions are now altering the way I look at the world immediately around me.. this is the final gift of Macfarlane’s wild places: they illuminate the wild wonder of our everyday world.”
National Geographic Traveler

The Wild Places boldly celebrates places that aren’t supposed to exist, and does so in prose that is at times very nearly as vivid and beautiful as the thing itself.”
—Rebecca Solnit

“ Prose as precise as this is not just evocative. It is a manifesto in itself. Macfarlane’s language urges us to gaze more closely at the wonders around us, to take notice, to remind ourselves how thrillingly alive a spell in the wild can make us seem.”
The Sunday Times (UK)


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