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ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES • NPR • THE GUARDIAN From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award- winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica. Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world. Read more
Publisher : Vintage
Publication date : January 7, 2020
Edition : Reprint
Language : English
Print length : 592 pages
ISBN-10 : 0375708472
ISBN-13 : 73
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 5.19 x 1.17 x 7.5 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #233,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #49 in Artic Polar Region Travel Guides #127 in Natural History (Books) #174 in Nature Writing & Essays
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Top Amazon Reviews
Format: Paperback
Barry Lopez ascended from an amazingly challenged childhood to become a 'Wisdom' writer who used his strange brain to bring both scientific and poetic insights into how all our cultures have dealt with amazing economic and environmental changes during his 50 years of writing. Horizon is a 500+ epic compilation of a lifetime of essays, observations and scientific research; it's not an easy book to read. But it's a satisfying and humbling book to read slowly, by readers of all ages and backgrounds. On p. 508 he writes about his experience at a small chapel at the very tip of South America, facing the Antarctica: I find it impossible to visit such places and not feel compassion. To regard the Milagros there as evidence of superstition, or to describe the-out-of-the-way chapels as backward, seems to me to dismiss what it means to be human, which is to live in fear in a world in which one's destiny is never entirely of one's own choosing." He never arrives, or leaves a non-western culture with arrogance or contempt. When he visited the South Pole he simply says: " There is no Longitude at the South pole. It's lone coordinate is 90 degrees South. From here, every direction is North....On the first day the temperature at Pole drops below -100 degrees F, which it does regularly in winter." For urban inhabitants in the West he brings forth such simple pieces of information from other places on Planet Earth, and encourages the reader to think about the alienness, and beauty. On p. 452 he shares: Whatever is imbedded in the sea ice, therefore, moves slowly closer to the surface...in some places the ice shelf is 2000' thick." This is a science fact share that may be incomprehensible for most readers in the West, and when they also hear that Alaska's Juneau Glacier is now melting at a rate of 50,000 gallons per second, they might stop to reflect. Finally, on p. 312, he wonders: "Living in one of the most highly advanced of human cultures, I often wonder. What have modern cultures done with these people? In our search for heroes to admire, did we just run over them? Were we suspicious about the humility, the absence of self-promotion, the lack of impressive material wealth and other signs of conventional success? Or were we afraid they would tell us a story we didn't want to hear? That they would suggest things we did not want to do?" Barry Lopez passed away in 2020, but his books, especially this 500 page selection of essays from his travels to almost every country of the world, might be a cautionary collection of tales, poetic insight and humble wisdom that might be useful for almost all of us as we contemplate radical changes to our environment and cultures.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2024 by Teach1
Format: Hardcover
Of 2019’s new books read or reviewed, Horizon by National Book Award-winning writer Barry Lopez can enrapture most. It journeys through remains and resurgences: the flotsam on an Oregon beach and rebirth of a nearby clear-cut forest; terrestrial fossils in Kenyan digs and extra-terrestrial ones by Lopez’s NASA team on Antarctica. The book is all about resilience – of things, species, cultures, environments, especially against harsh conditions, greedy exploitation, human irresponsibility, or evolutionary change. With significant climate change on our horizon, this timely book explores our upcoming evolutionary bumps, whether in the human species or the planet. The new emergent normal, like a planet populated by peoples with Alzheimer’s or autism, or life in a narcissistic, post-factual world. Not dwelling on how to stop the inevitable bumps, Lopez instead studies survival techniques: the tenacity of indigenous cultures facing exploitation in the Australian outback; adaptations in housing by ancient tribes fishing in the far-north Arctic. The book is a Prize contender, both for its writing and its vision. The writing is oceanic, coming in two-to-three-page waves, each with its own resounding point, but never losing the tidal theme, nor the rocking effect for the other side’s shore. It’s a macro-vision that rolls back into Blakean regard, in which each grain of sand is seen as containing the whole world. With a poet’s eye and ear, Lopez details and honors things with his scientific terminology, its microscopic, unique differentiation. The book’s ultimate message is enchantment: respect and marvel at each and every thing or being, endlessly. Hold a newborn and feel the course of all civilizations – experience exquisite delicacy amidst the awesome beauty of a vast horizon. So steeled, he implies, we can have resilience to survive major change. Aided, too, perhaps, by re-reading in this book beyond boundaries.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2020 by Dennis M. Corrigan
Format: Kindle
I have been reading this book for many months, enjoying bits as I had moments to read in various locations. The writing is captivating, the stories engaging. The author will be missed.
Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2021 by VintageJourneys
Format: Hardcover
Wow, Barry Lopez can write. Lopez considers his urge to look beyond the horizon of the physical world while layering ideas from his youth and his older self. The essays are thoughtful and beautiful and demand a slow read and for this reader—a second read. His thematic threads are layered and nuanced as well as direct. The world is a scary place right now: division, climate unrest, and more. Lopez doesn’t shy away from these horrors, yet he doesn’t leave us hopeless. This is the kind of book that makes one a better, more thoughtful person, because it demands attention with eloquent prose and honest analysis and reflection. It requires a cognitive interaction with a writer who combines critical thinking and compassion into a great collection of essays that work together to explore what it means to explore.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2019 by ALJ
Format: Kindle
Monumental, enlightening, astonishing in scope. Masterpiece by a great writer and a very wise human being. It sometimes reminded me of books by my beloved David Quammen, but the message here is more grave and fundamental. Author writes often about wisdom represented by the elders in many indigenous communities. Well, I think Barry Lopez himself is one of the best elders our Western society can get. World would be a better place if we would listen to him.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2022 by Tardigrade
Format: Hardcover
This is a beautiful and very wise reflection on a life lived through deep engagement with people and landscapes on our planet. For me, it has been a much needed corrective to all the frenetic argumentation and simplistic, mechanistic analysis we are surrounded with these days. Judging from some of the reviews here, it may in some ways not be a book for our time--that is, it may not be popular, which of course is what most strive for these days. But if you want to be reminded of the wonder and enormous importance of the world and the mindset that are a million miles from twitter, facebook, and cable-news one-upmanship, you might like it. He also has very important and helpful things to say about our global predicament.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2019 by Daniel S. Smith
Format: Kindle
Truly an outstanding read, one of those rare books that if reading a hardcopy, you notice you are running out of pages and will have to face it that the book will sadly have to end. To the critic who called it a fluffy travel memoir...you missed the message. To the critic who brought up the environmental cost of air travel...while valid, there are some people who need to see so many things this world holds, who can think and then put them togethet to make points tbat need to be made...Barry Lopez is one of those people. Currently about 2/3 through, but my view of the world has already been greatly expanded.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2019 by Tom Shimko
Format: Kindle
Overall it’s a good read but I grew tired of his constant haranguing ,and his practically willfully naive views of indigenous peoples. I am sorry to inform Barry Lopez but human conquest and subjugation of other humans is not unique to the “West”, but is what humans have been doing for millennia- probably since there were enough if us so that we regularly bumped into each other and fought over resources. As he notes briefly and but somehow passingly, Indians in the Pacific North West had slaves and a review of their potlatches clearly shows that women had a much lower status than men in those societies ( as they clearly do in some Australian Aboriginal communities because he wrote about how women were not permitted to participate in a religious ceremony which he was invited to observe). In terms of their respect for the land and nature it should be noted that the fires started by Aboriginal Australians and some N.American Indians radically and permanently altered the landscape and ecosystems - for the benefit of the People setting the fires; the pre- European Australian landscape was already devoid of certain megafauna exterminated by the Aborigines, just as Paleo Indians almost certainly exterminated much of the Pleistocene megafauna long before Westerners arrived. Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Olmec.. all had empires and ruled brutally by modern standards, as did the kingdoms of the Sahel, and Middle- East etc- human rights is a modern concept, sadly. Hawaii, whose annexation he deplores, was unified by * force * when Kamehameha I sent out warriors to * invade * Maui and Oahu and Molokai, after solidifying his control of the Big Island. There is a ridge above Honolulu where the warriors of Oahu threw themselves to their deaths rather than face capture ( and gruesome death or enslavement ) by the warriors - imperial invaders - of Hawaii. I have read that among some families with long histories in Oahu there is still resentment towards the Big Island. I think Barry Lopez wants to imagine that pre- Industrial mankind lived in some sort of natural, egalitarian paradise, and thus far from the case. Oh, I also take issue with his use of “ terrorist” as opposed to terrorist, and his suggestion that using remotely controlled aircraft to hunt and kill them is akin to murder. * Perhaps Mr. Lopez won’t mind if he or a family member some day end up on a hijacked airliner being directed into a skyscraper but those he calls “ terrorists”. Still, the book was pretty good when he stuck to the natural world, but not as good as Arctic Dreams
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Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2020 by D.E.