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Home Ground: Language for an American LandscapeBUY FROM AMAZON.COM
Price: $19.77
Usually ships in 24 hours  (16 customer reviews)RRP: Buy New: $19.77 You Save: $10.18 (34%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours EDITORIAL REVIEWBarry Lopez asked 45 poets and writers to define terms that describe America’s land and water forms — phrases like flatiron, bayou, monadnock, kiss tank, meander bar, and everglade. The result is a major enterprise comprising over 850 descriptions, 100 line drawings, and 70 quotations from works by Willa Cather, Truman Capote, John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, and others. Carefully researched and exquisitely written by talents such as Barbara Kingsolver, Lan Samantha Chang, Robert Hass, Terry Tempest Williams, Jon Krakauer, Gretel Ehrlich, Luis Alberto Urrea, Antonya Nelson, Charles Frazier, Linda Hogan, and Bill McKibben, Home Ground is a striking composite portrait of the landscape. At the heart of this expansive work is a community of writers in service to their country, emphasizing a language that suggests the vastness and mystery that lie beyond our everyday words. PRODUCT DETAILSPublisher: Trinity University PressPub. Date: 15th September 2006 Catalog: Book Media: Hardcover Number Of Pages: 480 Ean: 9781595340245 Isbn: 1595340246 ABOUT THIS BOOKUSER REVIEWS
A "vocabulary of place", collected and written by writers. Many great literary references in the short definitions and sidebar quotations. Not just a geographic lexicon, a travel book and memoir of places to go to and places to have been from. Great companion for books like Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men that use place as more than just settings, but as living characters.
It's just a dictionary of landscape terms. There are a FEW crude black and white illustrations in the book - NO COLOR, NO ARTWORK LIKE THE COVER. If you like reading dictionaries then this book might work for you. It's sort of like a historic dictionary, coffee table book on landscape trems with no photos. Some of the definitions are well written. Some of the words have interesting, not to be forgotten histories. That is the value of this book. But I'm not sure what to do with this book. Perhaps it will end up in the pum pile.
...but a little disappointing! I heard about this book on NPR. One small segment was read over the air. It was well-written and very evocative of the region described. However, the format of the book is the disappointing feature...I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't a dictionary! And not all the writing lives up to the standard of the author whose paragraph was read to us.
Everything Barry Lopez touches is guaranteed quality reading. "Home Ground" a wonderful reference for understanding various geographical/landscape features. Pulling the reference to same from literature onto the same page as the definition is a brilliant idea. I enjoy opening it and reading it at random and also referring to it to refresh myself on terms.
If you have a passion for the land, for the language, for fine writing, for earth's mysteries, and for peculiarities of places; and especially if you like books that are simply well-wrought objects, this is a truly beautiful volume. Trust to accident, and crack it open anywhere - you will be enlightened about some little place or feature you likely never knew existed. A true treasure. SIMILAR ITEMS: |
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It's Just a Dictionary
Some good writing...
Home Ground
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