Product Description

The acclaimed National Book Award winner gives us a collection of spellbinding new essays that, read together, form a jigsaw-puzzle portrait of an extraordinary man.

With the publication of his best-selling Of Wolves and Men, and with the astonishing originality of Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez established himself as that rare writer whose every book is an event, for both critics and his devoted readership. Now, in About This Life, he takes us on a literal and figurative journey across the terrain of autobiography, assembling essays of great wisdom and insight. Here is far-flung travel (the beauty of remote Hokkaido Island, the over-explored Galápagos, enigmatic Bonaire); a naturalist's contention (Why does our society inevitably strip political power from people with intimate knowledge of the land small-scale farmers, Native Americans, Eskimos, cowboys?); and pure adventure (a dizzying series of around-the-world journeys with air freight everything from penguins to pianos). And here, too, are seven exquisite memory pieces hauntingly lyrical yet unsentimental recollections that represent Lopez's most personal work to date, and which will be read as classics of the personal essay for years to come.

In writing about nature and people from around the world, by exploring the questions of our age, and, above all, by sharing a new openness about himself, Barry Lopez gives us a book that is at once vastly erudite yet intimate: a magically written and provocative work by a major American writer at the top of his form.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #299207 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-27
• Released on: 1999-04-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
"Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar." This advice, given to a father whose daughter wants to learn to write, is the organizing principle behind Barry Lopez's latest collection of essays and also the central theme behind his life as a writer. Author of 12 acclaimed books of nature writing, including the National Book Award-winning Arctic Dreams, Lopez is one of our most eloquent masters of the nearly lost art of paying attention. In this volume, a travelogue of journeys both inward and outward, he brings the same careful scrutiny to bear on the mystery of his own life and its interactions with the natural world.

Lopez has always been interested in tearing down artificial divides between nature and culture, landscape and identity, and nowhere does he do so more powerfully than in About This Life. These essays cover ground from the remote (in the group of travel essays entitled "Out of Country") to the familiar ("Indwelling"), the personal to the archetypal ("Remembrance" and "An Opening Quartet"). Whether he's joyriding around the world with air cargo, performing burials for animals found dead by the side of the road, or lamenting the commodification of the American landscape, Lopez writes with a surgeon's precision, a musician's ear, and a painter's eye for beauty found in unexpected places.

From Publishers Weekly
Contemplating forces physical and metaphysical within the natural landscape, veteran author and National Book Award-winner Lopez (Arctic Dreams, etc.) here taps personal and collective memory to create an intimate history of man and place. In these 13 essays, most of which have appeared in periodicals like Harper's (where Lopez is a contributing editor) and the Geogia Review, he reveals a mind that is energetically curious, repeatedly making a 10-hour round-trip to kiln-fire pottery in a tradition that catches his interest, or taking a marathon trip involving 40 consecutive air-freight flights in order to explore worldwide exporting and importing. But, on the latter trip, he stops for a sunrise walk in Seoul to see "things that could not be purchased," and, in another essay, quietly meditates on the power of hands. This dichotomy reflects the world traveler who is nevertheless rooted to a particular piece of land in western Oregon, someone whose mind encompasses the grand and the truly particular. To really understand a specific geography, he notes, takes time. Lopez has the kind of intimacy, of immersion, that makes the most ordinary encounter extraordinary. He deciphers nature's enigmatic intimations, as when he compares two proximate but distinct environments, saying: "The shock to the senses comes from a different shape to the silence, a difference in the very quality of light, in the weight of the air." For Lopez, the world's topography is memory made manifest; it stimulates Lopez's own recall and that, in turn, forces us to really think.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Lopez (The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren, LJ 9/1/94) has won numerous honors and awards for his nonfiction and fiction writing, primarily on natural history and the environment. Four of the 17 essays in this new anthology are newly written for this collection. The others have appeared previously, in slightly different forms and sometimes under different titles, in such publications as Harpers, North American Review, and Rocky Mountain magazine, spanning the period 1981-98. The introduction, called "The Voice," is autobiographical. The essays were chosen, the author says, "to give a sense of how one writer proceeds, and they are reflective of my notion of what it means to travel." Although they are not arranged chronologically, the reader does see the young Notre Dame student who speeds across Indiana in his brother's powerful Corvette develop into the observant writer who visits Japan, the Galapagos, and the Arctic. Of interest to public or academic libraries.ANancy Patterson Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

I Never Could Finish The Book, But Some Parts Are Good
I understand some people like this book very much, but I have a dissenting opinion. I did have the pleasure of hearing him read in person and he is indeed very captivating. But keep in mind what this book is about. It is basically a set of essays about places he has been and his insights and knowledge of those places. When it works, it works brilliantly. The essays I liked I could read several times over--he does some fascinating things (traveling on a cargo plane for several weeks comes to mind, or staying with a pottery community also comes to mind). However, when it doesn't work, you realize that not much is really happening and it feels very slow, maybe even unreadable. I just had to stop reading some of the essays after awhile. So it was really hit and miss with me.

What the other reviewers say about his attitude towards life and nature is right. He is very concerned with geography, not just the physical geography of a place, but also the emotional geography of a place. In a time when we don't always feel very connected to places, reading this book could help you feel connected again, to glimmer what it is like to really feel a part of the place in which you live.

Lessons in appreciating what is around us
Lopez redefines memoir by arranging a number of previously published essays with new ones to tell us about his life. We are taken from what are current interests back to his childhood where we discover how he learned to look at the world. Initially he was fortunate to have been given a mother who, though she was left by her husband with two young boys, was a woman interesting to interesting men. The mother continues to weave in and out of the essays, including the one about her death. We sit in the cold in Hokkaido, Japan, with three naturalists, who communicate from the soul (yes, maybe that is it!) because they have so little of each others' language. We find the Galapagos more volcanic than imagined, the coral reef in Bonaire more damaged than expected, and marvel that here is someone who stops his car and gently carries animals killed by drivers to grassy areas off the road. Lopez used to be a photographer so sees the earth and all in it illuminated by varying kinds and angles of light. He discusses the power of memory. And we enjoy the elegance of his prose. We watch the almost mystical work of a potter called Jack and hear how necessary it is to walk in the river sometimes. Yet all is not romance from this naturalist who insists we look at nature straight on. It is not a theme park and cannot be made to behave as one. This is a strong, beautiful book. Many vicarious journeys to be taken here with the expert.

Hands and Wood Fired Pottery
This book covers a wide range of subjects that cross the threshold of memory and stop the reader in her tracks. A whole chapter on the wonder of hands - A Passage of the Hands - causes the reader to consider their own hands and those of a young child with a sense of their history and their possibility.

I recommeded the chapter on wood firing of pottery - Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire- to friends who are potters. The world of anagama kilns was opened to me.

About traveling , Lopez states:"If I were to now visit another country,I would ask my local companion, before I saw any museum or library, any factory or fabled town, to walk me in the country of his or her youth, to tell me the name of things and how, traditionally, they have been fitted together in a community. I would ask for the stories, the voice of memory over the land. I would ask to taste the wild nuts and fruits, to see their fishing lures, their bouquets, their fences. I would ask about the history of storms there, the age of trees, the winter color of the hills. Only then would I ask to see the museums."

Read this book and enjoy the journey.