Macfarlane's glossaries…come from his years of wide-ranging reading and conversation. The result is a beguiling book, and also a very British one—if that isn't too broad a term for a work drawing on Old English, Norn, Anglo-Romani, Cornish, Welsh, Gaelic and the Orcadian, Shetlandic and Doric dialects of Scots…Alternating with the word lists are fine essays on nature writers who have been Macfarlane's companions on a lifetime of literal and literary walking…But for many readers, the wonderfully exotic words will be the thing, even if Macfarlane admits they are sometimes superfluous. "Language is always late for its subject," he writes. "Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, 'Wow.'"

Landmarks, a remarkable book on language and landscape…makes a passionate case for restoring the "literacy of the land," for recalling and setting down the lexicon of the natural world, at a time when it's rapidly disappearing…Mr. Macfarlane embarks on this ambitious task by taking us to the farthest reaches of the British countryside, exploring it with (or in the footsteps of) some of the nature writers he most admires. He picks writers who "use words exactly and exactingly," and that's what he does, too. He's an erudite, lyrical, enthusiastic and exceptionally well-read guide…For a book so self-effacing and respectful of the words of others, Landmarks is wildly ambitious, part outdoor adventure story, part literary criticism, part philosophical disquisition, part linguistic excavation project, part mash note—a celebration of nature, of reading, of writing, of language and of people who love those things as much as the author does. It's an argument for sitting down with a book; it's also an argument for going outside and paying attention…Landmarks feels as if it should be read near a river, in the mountains, in a meadow or on a moor, the wind riffling through your hair, maybe even a gentle rain falling, and no one for miles except a friend to read the best bits aloud to.

05/30/2016
Macfarlane’s (The Old Ways) beautifully written blend of nature writing and lexicon connects the work of his favorite writers to the British Isles’ natural settings and the distinctive, lyrical vocabulary used to describe them. Each chapter is devoted to a different landform (such as flatlands, coastlands, and woodlands) and followed by a glossary of relevant terminology. The featured authors include “word-hoarder” Nan Shepherd, whose book The Living Mountain has its own lengthy glossary of colorful Scots words, such as “roarie-bummlers” (fast-moving storm clouds); and “water-man” Roger Deakin, whose book Waterlog, about his experiences swimming around the United Kingdom, unearthed archaic words such as dook (a swim in open water) and tarn (an upland pool or small lake.) The sources of the words in the glossaries are as diverse as the British landscape: works by famous wordsmiths such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Clare, as well as the various cultures, regions, and languages of Great Britain. Macfarlane bemoans the gradual disappearance of these colorful descriptors from modern usage, resulting in a “blandscape” of general terms. It would be fabulous if his wish in writing this exceptional compilation—for these words to “re-wild” contemporary speech—comes true. (Aug.)

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE


Praise from America and England for Landmarks

"Landmarks is wildly ambitious, part outdoor adventure story, part literary criticism, part philosophical disquisition, part linquistic excavation project, part mash note. . . It's an argument for sitting down with a book; it's also an argument for going outside and paying attention."
– The New York Times

"[A] magnificent meditation on the words we have for describing the natural world. . . [Macfarlane] is the great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation.”
- Tom Shippey, The Wall Street Journal

“Simply one of the best nature history books I have read in years, Landmarks is a stunning paean to the beauty of language, the craft of writing and the power of nature. It is truly a book that will force you to rethink your relationship to the world around you.”
– The Seattle Times

“[A] fascinating, poetic compilation of vocabulary invented to describe the natural world. . .Lucent, lyrical prose evokes Macfarlane’s aesthetic, ethical, and powerfully tactile response to nature’s enchantments.”
– Kirkus Reviews
 
“Macfarlane’s beautifully written blend of nature writing and lexicon connects the work of his favorite writers to the British Isles’ natural settings and the distinctive, lyrical vocabulary used to describe them. . .[An] exceptional compilation.”
– Publishers Weekly
 
“This joyous meditation on land and language is a love letter to the British Isles.” 
- Observer

“Lyrical, charged with a monumental strength. Surely no one since the young Ted Hughes has written about British landscape and wildlife with such fierce enthusiasm. Few writers today have such power to make you look afresh at the familiar . . . making a British countryside come alive as the most exotic place on earth.” 
- Daily Express

“Astonishing and revelatory. Please read Landmarks, encounter its wonderful words, let them open your mind . . . start looking at the world in the dazzlingly receptive way they have taught you.” 
- Adam Nicolson, Spectator

“As teeming and complex as an ecosystem, rawly moving, enormously pleasurable, historically important and imaginatively compelling, elegant and scholarly.”
- Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

“Passionate and magical...A deep scholarship of the countryside with an adventurous approach, all rendered in immaculate, delicious prose. Macfarlane offers an enriched nature. A kind of manual of how people in love with place and language are created by landscape.”
- Horatio Clare, Daily Telegraph

“So important, enriching. Ought to be read by policymakers, educators, armchair environmentalists and active conservationists the world over.”
- John Burnside, Guardian

In his dynamic new novel, Colson Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad--the loosely interlocking network of black and white activists who helped slaves escape to freedom in the decades before the Civil War--and turns it from a metaphor into an actual train that ferries fugitives northward. The result is a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery.
—The New York Times

★ 2016-05-05
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.