ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:THE NEW YORK TIMES • NPR • THE GUARDIANFrom pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the … the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.
Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.
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Barry Lopez is a straight-up magnificent writer. To read Horizon is to be transported to wondrous landscapes far beyond the pale, and thereby obtain an astounding perspective on our increasingly uncertain future. Lopez expresses faith that our species can avert annihilation by investing ‘more deeply in the philosopher’s cardinal virtues’: courage, justice, reverence, and compassion—virtues this book possesses in abundance.
This long (572 pages), dazzling book by Barry Lope aptly reflects its title, a thing marvelously perceived and always out of reach. Like a meditation, it wanders through beautiful, exotic, mystifying landscapes on (and below) earth tying together thoughts, impressions, breathtaking reflections from vistas the ordinary reader is unlikely to have seen. It is at once historical, scientific, philosophical and mystical. It is unerringly beautiful.
For fans of Barry Lopez—a traveler, adventurer and environmentalist with a great love of humanity and its achievements, this is a crowning glory. It is a book of despair at what we humans have done to the earth, and of hope in understanding what we can achieve. It is also a book no one but Lopez, with his wealth of experiences inhabiting the far places and living among the most distant people, could write. He’s spent serious time with natives of the Arctic and the ancient and aboriginal peoples of Africa and Australia. He’s gone on archeological digs with Richard Leakey in Kenya, camped on or dived beneath ice with scientific expeditions in Antarctica, and hiked alone at night in the Galapagos Islands. The fitness and prowess required to adapt to such extreme circumstances already sets him apart.
But Lopez’s ability to make sense of these things, to make connections and to cogently share them is a gift to his readers. Several threads are skillfully woven throughout the book, including the tales of two early explorers. One is the Enlightenment hero and seafaring explorer, Captain James Cook, whom Lopez much admires. He hails Cook’s scientific genius and his invaluable books while also recognizing that his privileged position in life led to fame and fortune. Another figure Lopez admires is explorer Ranald MacDonald whose story shadows Cook’s. The son of a Chinook woman and a Scots clerk at the Hudson Bay Co. in Astoria, the mixed-race young man felt at home in neither world. He became a seaman, drifted, had many adventures, and spent a long time in Japan where he felt an affinity for the people who resembled the Chinook. He warned them to beware the Westerners, who would dissolve their culture when they encroached. MacDonald died poor and unknown.
The disparate tales of those two men informs much of Lopez’s thinking. He rues the legacy of colonialism, which he believes has left a trail of devastation worldwide, and cultural superiority that “has poisoned personal human relations for millennia.” But he also searches with hope for a remedy for our present ecological disasters conjecturing that “an unprecedented openness to other ways of thinking” might be today “humanity’s only life raft.” Readers will be persuaded to get on the raft with him and follow the tides wherever they go.
An essential voice in American writing. Barry Lopez’s stories of inquiry and discovery are gloriously riveting, bringing the reader into a research boat, an archaeological site, a night-tent conversation, water forty feet under the edge of an ice shelf. At each place where he turns his eye and mind, something is learned of existence’s richness and meaning. A master work. This book is a map to treasures everywhere buried.
A huge-hearted, wise and sorrowful book by the Philosopher-King of Gaia. A masterpiece.
The world is vast, and so are the heart and the curiosity of Barry Lopez. His voice is incomparable and necessary. No one else alive, to my knowledge, thinks so carefully about the moral dimensions of landscape.
No one has worked harder to make sense of our present civilization than Barry Lopez, and in these chronicles we get to share the travels that helped shape his extraordinary mind and heart. A great gift to us all.
A celebration and investigation of the impulse to explore, Horizon is itself an exploration — of both the human and inhuman worlds. In his intensity, his clarity, and his capacity for wonder, Barry Lopez is unmatched.
Nobody journeys like Barry Lopez. He’s humble, he’s ethical, he’s honest, he’s curious, he’s doubtful, he’s properly sad and he’s wild. He wakes us up to the worth and the mystery of the world. His great affection for humanity comes up from every patch of earth he visits. This is an epic book that goes from pole to pole, and yet manages to make a distinct ‘everywhere’ out of each little patch he visits. A glorious book, gloriously told.
Riveting, seductive, and beautifully written. I don’t know of any other writer who so mesmerizingly, so seemingly effortlessly, weaves together art, science and poetry — I found myself underlining sentences on every page. Barry Lopez is one of my literary heroes.