Add Seats to the Supreme Court to unpack it. Use the domain unpackthecourt.com to make your voices heard. It is for sale.

Book Cover

Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside,
2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and
anthropological observations.

“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have
brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and
attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never
actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of
visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of
the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the
world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in
them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds
differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance,
he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter
a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on
the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were
along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess
Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it
into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his
travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best
things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping
narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying
to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte
Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a
swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met
as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape
Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes,
achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of
accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”

Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.

kirkusreviews.com

Add comment