The Savage Landscape
How We Made the Wilderness
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'This is a book about searching in the best sense – full of ideas, beauty, doubt and adventures' ELIZABETH KOLBERT
'Fascinating and masterfully written' ALICE WINN
A lyrical exploration of the world’s most forbiddingly remote places, the supposedly uninhabited wildernesses of the world – and the humans who have always been there, by award-winning and critically acclaimed writer Cal Flyn.
The Savage Landscape takes us into the wild – deep into dark forests, to the top of mountains and into the heart of deserts. It addresses our deep yearnings to be awed and inspired by landscapes that remain beyond our reach and examines what nature gets up to in the absence of humans. It is a book full of ideas, beauty and adventure, and one that asks provocative questions about the nature of wilderness and how wild places might be appreciated or preserved.
As with her earlier book Islands of Abandonment, Flyn focuses each chapter on eleven locations chosen for their physical beauty, their perceived isolation and the moral or emotional complexity of the human stories that can be found there. In her search for wilderness, we meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds seeing off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks; hunters in the African bush; volcanophiles creeping dangerously close to molten lava; and ocean vessels plunging through the immense waters of the Southern Ocean to Antarctica.
The Savage Landscape will change any reader’s understanding of our place in the world, and how we relate to the other residents of this planet – human and animal. It is a profound and beautiful book about spirituality, environmentalism and the sublime by one of the most gifted writers at work today.
'A book that takes you into the wild and ignites the imagination. Compelling and thought provoking, Flyn’s journey into the heart of the matter challenges us to rethink the relationship between human culture and nature' SUE STUART SMITH
'The Savage Landscape enthralled me—leading me spellbound through our encounters with and imaginings of wilderness and its many faces. In Flyn’s hands, a deeply researched history is given vibrant, propulsive life' JESSICA J LEE
About the author
Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland. She writes creative nonfiction, literary criticism, and long-form journalism.
Her first book, Thicker Than Water, about frontier violence in colonial Australia, was a Times book of the year. Her second book, Islands of Abandonment — about the ecology and psychology of abandoned places — has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards including the Wainwright Prize, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction.
Cal’s journalistic writing has been published in Granta, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, The Economist, and others. Cal was previously writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library and at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland. She was made a MacDowell fellow in 2019, and in 2022 was announced the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Flyn (Islands of Abandonment) delivers an exhilarating exploration of the nature and meaning of wild lands. The ideal of untouched wilderness is a myth, she argues, revealing that human history is present in even the most remote landscapes. She travels to deserts, mountains, and forests around the world to demonstrate how humanity's conception of wilderness has changed over time. A trip to Egypt's Mount Sinai elucidates wilderness's ancient roots as a symbol of penance and renewal, as she discusses how people would search the desert for spiritual insight. In medieval times, wilderness came to be associated with the supernatural, as Flyn demonstrates through her visit to Transylvania, where people once believed werewolves and witches inhabited the woods. Over time, as the world industrialized and urbanized, efforts were made to preserve natural landscapes—at first, for the sake of aesthetics and recreation and then, as environmental anxiety grew, to protect natural resources and biodiversity. However, the global conservation movement has displaced millions of people from their homelands, according to Flyn. In Uganda, for example, efforts to protect mountain gorillas in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest led to the removal of Indigenous Batwa forest people, who then became destitute. Throughout, Flyn blends exciting travel writing with deep philosophical discussions. Readers will be forced to rethink what wilderness is and whom it benefits.
