The Lost Art of Walking
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Walking was once the only way to get around but now we just walk to the bus stop, station or car. Or we walk as a lifestyle choice - trekking holidays, charity walks, urban explorations. Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Artof Walking brings pedestrianism back to the centre of life by musing on his own walks, reflecting on writers, artists, musicians and film makers who take walking as a subject, and by looking at some of the great walkers in history - the competitive, the adventurous, the philosophical, the merely eccentric. The book takes us far further than most would consider walking distance, from the Oxford Street of de Quincey's London to the mean streets of Los Angeles, from the concrete canyons of New York City to the seven hills of Sheffield, by way of the British seaside and the deserts of America, Egypt and Australia. Along the way it describes encounters with nude walkers,labyrinth walkers, psychogeographers, among many others. The Lost Art of Walking is discursive, imaginative, full of insight and sometimes downright hilarious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Setting foot in a street makes it yours in a way that driving down it never does," says Nicholson (Sex Collectors), and mundane though walking may be, Nicholson tells us in this leisurely, charmingly obsessive literary stroll, pedestrianism is not without drama, from pratfalls like the one in which he broke his arm on an innocuous Hollywood Hills street to getting lost in the desert of western Australia. Walks, he reminds us, have inspired writers from Thoreau and Emerson to Dickens and Joyce, as well as musicians from Fats Domino to Aerosmith. Nicholson guides readers from the streets of L.A. where walkers are invariably regarded with suspicion to New York City and London. He considers the history of "eccentric" walkers like the "competitive pedestrian" Capt. Robert Barclay Allardice, whose early 19th-century walking feats gave him the reputation of a show-off. From street photographers to "perfect" walks the first at the Poles, the first on the moon and walks that never happened, Nicholson's genial exploration of this "most ordinary, ubiquitous activity" is lively and entertaining.
