Lucent, lyrical prose evokes Macfarlane’s aesthetic, ethical, and powerfully tactile response to nature’s enchantments.
A prizewinning naturalist explores the connection between what we say and how we see.
“A basic literacy of landscape is falling away,” writes Macfarlane (The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, 2012, etc.) with regret. “A common language—a language of the commons—is getting rarer.” He was dismayed when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary eliminated words such as acorn, catkin, heather, and nectar in favor of blog, broadband, and voicemail to reflect, the publisher explained, “the consensus experience of modern-day childhood.” In this fascinating, poetic compilation of vocabulary invented to describe the natural world, the author aims to “re-wild our contemporary language for landscape” and enrich our “vibrancy of perception.” “Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment,” he writes, “for language does not just register experience, it produces it.” Throughout, Macfarlane chronicles his peregrinations across different landscapes, including flatlands, highlands, water, coast, and woods, sometimes in the company of friends, often with references to nature and travel writers he admires (Roger Deakin, John Stilgoe, and Barry Lopez, to name a few) and to earlier word researchers. Each chapter is followed by a glossary of terms for aspects of “land, sea, weather and atmosphere” gleaned from English, Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh, Breton, and other dialects of the British Isles. Readers will discover, for example, that a “bunny bole” names the entrance to a mine in Cornwall; a “lunky” is a “gap in a fence or dyke (big enough to let sheep through but not cattle)” in Galloway; “oiteag” is Gaelic for a “wisp of wind”; and in Shetland, “skub” describes “hazy clouds driven by the wind.” Macfarlane has found 50 words for various permutations of snow, including “ungive” to describe thawing, in Northamptonshire. Many terms, the author contends, function as “tiny poems that conjure scenes.”
Lucent, lyrical prose evokes Macfarlane’s aesthetic, ethical, and powerfully tactile response to nature’s enchantments.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-241-96787-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
In seven case histories, Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife Fora Hat, 1985, etc.) once again presents the bizarre both clinically and lyrically, challenging assumptions about the landscape of human reality. The fascination of Dr. Sacks's approach to neurological disorder is his attempt to empathize with patients whose realities can't be described in normal terms. He dares to wonder how pathology can shape consciousness and the concept of self. To him, a patient is not a broken machine, but an inhabitant of an unfamiliar world. And sometimes those alien worlds are more hospitable than the one we are used to. After an accident, a successful artist (referred to as Mr. I) loses the ability to experience color: Not only can't he see it, he can't dream it, remember it, or even imagine it. After a period of extreme depression and uncertainty, he comes to think of his condition as "a strange gift" that allows him to experience the physical world in a unique way. Virgil, whose sight is restored after a lifetime of blindness, is crushed by the bewilderment of vision; his brain has never learned to see, but his comfortable life as a blind person is irrevocably over. And then there is Temple Grandin, an animal-science professor and a high-functioning autistic who has only learned the rules of interpersonal relationships by memorizing them like complex math problems, though her empathy with animals is astonishing. Occasionally, Sacks provides too much technical detail — long riffs on the mechanics of vision, for instance — but these are minor distractions. (The essays have been previously published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.) Readers may come to Sacks's work as voyeurs, but they will leave it with new and profound respect for the endless labyrinth of the human mind.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43785-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
Negroponte—founder of MIT's groundbreaking Media Lab—offers a brief, rambling survey of the digitization of culture that's not nearly as original as one might expect. His commentary ranges over an impressive array of subjects, from education and entertainment to art, business, and personal planning. Along the way he offers informed observations on such questions as how virtual reality will transform video games, how E- mail will affect your phone bill, how the information superhighway will put video-rental shops out of business, and how semi- intelligent ``butlers'' will help you navigate the ocean of data that will soon be pouring into your home. But this very range of subjects contributes to the book's major flaw: It's scattered and disorganized, more a collection of off-the-cuff ruminations than a useful analysis of any one of these areas (let alone all of them). Some of Negroponte's musings are striking and valuable (how the fax machine has actually hampered the development of digital communication, and how backward thinking has hamstrung high- definition television), but much of the text has a peculiarly stale smell. Do we need another assertion of the Internet's democratizing power or another thumbnail critique of our antiquated and ineffective educational system? The book's uneven tone makes it hard to tell for sure what audience Negroponte's aiming for, veering between oversimplification and clunky jargon. He drops names and introduces various relevant projects, such as the Media Lab's LEGO-Logo education program, but he provides very little description of any of them. Even the Media Lab itself gets only a sketchy paragraph-long portrait toward the very end. Negroponte brings decades of experience to his subject, but it's all for naught; his book is a muddle of retread cyber-hype and familiar predictions, relieved only by occasional flashes of original insight. (First printing of 100,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43919-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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