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How We Made the Wilderness
by Cal Flyn
A lyrical exploration of the world's wildest, most forbiddingly remote places—and the humans who have always been there, by an award-winning and critically acclaimed writer.
From the blacksand beaches of Iceland, to river crossings deep in the Amazon jungle, to the barren beauty of Antarctica, wildernesses make up some of the world's more alluring natural landscapes. But what is a wilderness, really? It is a powerful, ancient concept, lying at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. And for thousands of years, people have sought out uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from modern life. More recently these "pristine" places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans.
But as award-winning writer Cal Flyn traverses the most forbidding, untamed and inhospitable wild lands—the supposedly uninhabited wilds of the world—she finds that such truly untouched lands don't exist: Nearly every wilderness has been or is actively inhabited by humans. Here we meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds running off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.
The Savage Landscape takes us into these breathtaking wilds—deep into dark forests, to the tops of mountains, and into the hearts of deserts—asking provocative questions about the nature of wilderness, its preservation, and its meaning.
"Flyn delivers an exhilarating exploration of the nature and meaning of wild lands ... blend[ing] exciting travel writing with deep philosophical discussions. Readers will be forced to rethink what wilderness is and whom it benefits." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Cal Flyn goes looking for answers to a troublesome question: what is wilderness? The Savage Landscape is a book of searching in the best sense—full of ideas, beauty, doubts, and adventures." —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction
"Cal Flyn is one of the most exciting writers around—for the poetry and precision of her prose, for the vast scope of her learning, for her fearless (and self-questioning) spirit. In The Savage Landscape, she opens one door after another, to wonder, to terror, to rich and mixed feelings, so that we can see the world anew and in all its deepest dimensions. This book is at once thrilling adventure and bracing meditation." —Pico Iyer, bestselling author of Aflame
This information about The Savage Landscape was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Cal Flyn is the current Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University, deputy editor of the literary recommendations site Five Books, and has written for publications including The Guardian, Granta, National Geographic, and The Wall Street Journal. Cal is a fellow of MacDowell and Yaddo, has been a writer in residence at Gladstone's Library and at the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland, and was named a 2022 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. She was the winner of the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the John Burroughs Medal and was a finalist for the Wainwright Prize, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
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