Latitudes
Encounters with a Changing Planet
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
2025 Banff Mountain Book Competition Finalist (Environmental Literature)
"McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." Publishers Weekly
"Meditative and sumptuous… Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change." Foreword Reviews
"Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect." Julia Bell, author of Massive and Hymnal
"Her shimmering prose brings into sharp focus the beauty of the remote places where we can glimpse – and sometimes hear – what our planet was like before us. And what it might be in the silence that will come after the frenzy of human dominance." Margie Orford
"This one has knocked me sideways: it's, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I've read this year." Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio
"This one has knocked me sideways: it's, on a sentence-by-sentence level, honestly the best thing I've read this year." Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio
"Latitudes is a book that will linger with you long after you have turned the last page." – Sarah Birch in The Hackney Citizen
Relating thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes is a thrilling and thought-provoking exploration of a changing planet. At once memoir, journal and travelogue of Earth's wildernesses, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada.
Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an age of dramatic ecological loss. It shows us the importance of listening to the living world that is speaking to us, if we open ourselves to hear its voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this meditative essay collection, McNeil (Fire on the Mountain) draws from decades of travel to the world's most remote places to reflect on the beauty and terror of wild landscapes that are under ecological threat. Whether she's recounting her time as a writer-in-residence on an Antarctic research station, an observer aboard a research vessel off the coast of Greenland, or a trainee in an African safari guide program, McNeil captures nature in evocative and dexterous prose: a group of rhinos approach, "sweeping back and forth like a cadre of Mennonites scything the fields"; waves raking a reef off the coast of Kenya "appear as a lace hem to an endless blue garment." McNeil's laudable goal of understanding the world "on its own terms," however, can skirt uncomfortably close to colonialist travel narratives, especially when she professes kinship with the African wilderness. While McNeil writes more than once of the suspicions she arouses while traveling as a childless, unmarried woman, she's curiously silent about the optics of her attempts to interpret the African landscape as a Canadian who lives in London. Some blind spots aside, McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff.
