Robert Macfarlane is the author of a prizewinning quartet of books about landscape and the human heart: Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, and Landmarks. He has contributed to Harper's, Granta, The New Yorker, the Observer (London), the Times Literary Supplement (London), and the London Review of Books. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Praise for The Old Ways:
"With a steady command of the literature and history of each place
he visits, [Macfarlane] tries 'to read landscapes back into being.'
His sentences bristle with the argot of cartographers, geologists,
zoologists, and botanists." -The New Yorker "Macfarlane explores
the meditative aspects of being a pedestrian...not so much a
travelogue as a travel meditation, it favors lush prose, colorful
digressions...if you've ever had the experience, while walking, of
an elusive thought finally coming clear or an inspiration surfacing
after a long struggle, The Old Ways will speak to you - eloquently
and persuasively." -The Seattle Times
"A backpack of assorted expeditions charted by a writer whose
poetic and scientific skills are equal to one another...there are
some splendid set pieces." -The Wall Street Journal
"A wonderfully meandering account of the author's peregrinations
and perambulations through England, Scotland, Spain, Palestine, and
Sichuan...Macfarlane's particular gift is his ability to bring a
remarkably broad and varied range of voices to bear on his own
pathways and to do so with a pleasingly impressionist yet tenderly
precise style." -Aengus Woods, themillions.com"Macfarlane seems to
know and have read everything...his every sentence rewrites the
landscape in language crunchy and freshly minted and deeply
textured. Surely the most accomplished (and erudite) writer on
place to have come along in years." -Pico Iyer
"Luminous, possessing a seemingly paradoxical combination of the
dream-like and the hyper-vigilant, The Old Ways is, as with all of
Macfarlane's work, a magnificent read. Each sentence can carry
astonishing discovery." -Rick Bass
"In Macfarlane, British travel writing has a formidable new
champion... Macfarlane is read above all for the beauty of his
prose and his wonderfully innovative and inventive way with
language...he can write exquisitely about anywhere." -William
Dalrymple, The Observer
"In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of
other journeys and there are no clear divisions to be made...the
walking of paths is, to [Macfarlane], an education, and symbolic,
too, of the very process by which we learn things: testing,
wandering about a bit, hitting our stride, looking ahead and
behind." -Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
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