Horizon

October 15, 2018

Ranging from western Oregon, the Arctic, and the Galápagos to Kenya's deserts, Australia's Botany Bay, and Antarctica's ice shelves, the National Book Award-winning Lopez (Arctic Dreams) recalls some of his most significant worldwide jaunts. He also ventures back in time to chronicle prehistoric peoples on Canada's Skraeling Island, for instance, and a Native American emissary's experiences in isolationist Japan. Lopez's backlist has sold more than a million copies.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2018
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations."Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another." So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, "unlike me...felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning." The author's chapter on talismans--objects taken from his travels, such as "a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite"--is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli's Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he'd met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years' worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, "we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes."Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.

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Starred review from January 1, 2019
As a preternaturally curious boy subjected to coast-to-coast upheavals, Lopez dreamed of traveling the world, and travel he has, with serious intent, to 70 countries, becoming, along the way, a much-lauded writer of conscience who illuminates the nexus between natural and human history. In his most encompassing, autobiographical, passionately detailed, and reflective book, a life's travelogue, he shares memories, stories, observations, concerns, condemnations, and hope. Prodigiously attentive out in the world and rigorous on the page, morally inquisitive and bracingly candid, Lopez pegs this expansive narrative to places that have special resonance for him, beginning with Oregon's Cape Foulweather, so named by Captain James Cook. Lopez visits archaeological sites in the Canadian High Arctic, takes measure of environmental pressures on the Gal�pagos Islands, participates in fieldwork in East Equatorial Africa, studies penal colonies in Australia, and searches for meteorites in Antarctica. Each place on Earth goes deep, writes Lopez, as does he. Sharply attuned to the wonders and decimation of the living world, the endless assaults against indigenous people, and the daunting challenges of a changing climate, Lopez tells revelatory tales, poses tough questions, and shares wisdom, all while looking to the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)