Robert MacFarlane is precise in presenting his sprawling hunger for the wild. He sleeps out on a beach in a raging storm, on a bare mountaintop in the cold, and in all manner of haunted woods and rocks. His prose is refined, carefully deployed as if he were doing microsurgery. His wanderlust is...
A beautiful, affecting and haunting book, with probably the finest descriptive prose I've ever read. It's non-fiction so there's little more to say beyond the wealth of emotion it evokes in this boy who grew up in the country. Few books will stay with me quite the way this one has, if anyone pers...
In projected volumes Macfarlane proposes to take up valleys, deserts and oceans of the mind. These sound plausible as any "collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans--a mountain of the mind" (18, 19). The value of collaboration is this, we can have mountains, ...