Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 Inspirational November 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An enormously evocative work. MacFarlane is a deeply sensitive writer, and manages to maintain a intense creative tension between wilderness and civilisation. If you are into the wilderness and outdoors, and have ever struggled to put into words what it is, and why you do it. Then this book is for you.
A superb evocation of wildness October 14, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful book, and beautifully written. It reads like poetry. The only book I can compare it to is the little gem of a book written by Nan Shepherd about the Cairngorm Mountains and published in 1977 - The Living Mountain. Sadly this seems to be out of print, which is tragic as it deserves to be a classic and is the nearest thing to poetry in prose I have ever read. Nan Shepherd was Professor of English at Aberdeen University and I met her when I was working there in the seventies. I fell in love with the Cairngorms, as she did, and spent many days walking in them and camping alone in the hills. I love their harsh grandeur and the sense of space and light and hugeness, the pure air, the white mountain hares, all the wildlife which you see so much better alone, and the pure water which tastes like light. If you can get a copy, read it! Robert Macfarlane captures the same sense of wonder at wildness. We need wildness, and it would be tragic if we came to treat the few remaining wild places as playgrounds for townies to exert their machismo and to show their ability to conquer and to dominate. The wild is food for the soul, and we destroy it at our peril.We must learn to live with it, not subdue it.
 Disappointing... October 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I settled down with this book, expecting an enjoyable read. It should have been just my thing: wild places, the great outdoors, etc. But after an interesting digression about maps, in the first few pages, it was all downhill. Robert Macfarlane is po-faced and portentious; he takes himself very seriously indeed. His "honeyed prose" (London Review of Books) is actually rather turgid. Worst of all, I didn't see the landscape through his eyes; even as he is describing wild places, the cumulative effect is oddly claustrophobic. Instead of firing me to to go and see the places he visited, I just got more and more irritated.
 Oh for God's sake! September 2, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
It woud be churlish to say that Robert Macfarlane's writing is not beautifully crafted and I wish I had his vocabulary and skill with words, but that's about as far as it goes. Much of this book seems to me to be pompous and smug. I get the impression that landsacape is a stage that Macfarlane uses to show how clever and sensitive he is. Most of the chapters have a small percentage about the so called wild place and a huge amount of pseudo intellectual background. Why he can't he just go to these places without the need to read forty books beforehand and then tell us all about them? There's also this slightly sanctimonious and quasi spiritual tone throughout - very hard to put my finger on, but it irritates me - it reminds of the writing that fills the pages of Resurgance magazine; all rainbows and wonder. I just knew that at some point he'd talk about wildness in miniature - I could feel it coming - and sure enough he looks into a gryke... Doesn't he ever just want to say: 'For God's sake Roger (Deakin), stop swimming in your darn moat and do something less pretentious instead.'
 Location, location, location August 31, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Readers will not fail to appreciate Robert Macfarlane's beautiful and evocative prose, or doubt his love of wild locations. However after his excellent `Mountains of the Mind' I found this latest book a huge disappointment. The former was more visionary and it prompted mental exploration, whereas for `The Wild Places' I was left as a bystander to physical exploration - and yet the first was `merely' short-listed for the Boardman-Tasker Award in 2003, and though not a mountaineering or climbing book `The Wild Places' won outright in 2007. So what do I know?
I understand it was after writing `Mountains of the Mind' that Robert Macfarlane met Roger Deakin, a philosophical environmentalist also producing a book - `Wildwood'. I believe Macfarlane was influenced greatly by Deakin, and much is made of their friendship with homage paid to Deakin after his untimely death. Brief reference is made to Macfarlane's own family, but it is piece-meal and insufficient to know him personally. This is unfortunate as expectations, perceptions and responses to the wild vary with the individual. I suspect not all readers will agree with Robert Macfarlane's definitions of wild places.
`The Wild Places' is presented as a series of landscape essays headed `Beechwood', `Island', Valley', `Moor', etc. in which Macfarlane describes locations, introduces characters met, refers to earlier commentators, explains historical background, and makes literary connections. I enjoyed much of this - especially for locations known to me - but I do not comprehend his adverse reaction to a night on Ben Hope, a mountain I climbed recently [May 2008}. That apart, a pattern emerges throughout the essays and it is somewhat surprising how very different locations are dealt with in similar manner. There is considerable repetition, and I am unsure about coupling of wild places with numerous episodes of skinny-dipping in cold water, kipping out in storms, shinning up trees, or hoarding of momentos.
What I do acknowledge positively is Macfarlane's emphasis on wild places as quite different from wilderness. Indeed he provides evidence of how wild places do not have to be in the wilderness but can be found at locations with easy access from almost anywhere. Though readers are largely treated as observers to Macfarlane's actions, they should be inspired to re-assess locations they already know, and to search out something further.
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