I am an archaeologist, writer, and university lecturer, who spends his days dreaming of being on the move. I was filled with life-long wanderlust from a peripatetic childhood living in Malaysia, Fiji, and Cyprus, and this sense of needing to move around has never left me. I am a passionate walker and have rambled and roamed and trekked and trailed around most of the British Isles, often with my (occasionally willing) family. This has led to an intense fascination with the way people moved around in the past and how they knew where they were going, and I have centred much of my research, and my writing, on the subject.
Footmarks is a book about humanity’s irrepressible restlessness. It follows the footsteps of early hunter-gatherers preserved in mud, and treads ancient trackways hollowed by feet over time. Passing drovers, wayfarers, and pilgrims, it tracks back over the last three and a half million years to see how footprints lead to pathways, which in turn become roads. Threading backwards and forwards over time, Footmarks reveals how people have always been moving. How travel has historically been enforced (or prohibited) by people with power, and how – over unfathomably long periods – our forebears showed incredible bravery and ingenuity to journey across continents and oceans, in waves of migration through every part of the globe.
I love walking and I love history, and so Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking flicks my switch.
In a series of captivating and authoritative essays, Solnit takes us on parades, pilgrimages, and protest marches. We walk with philosophers and romantics, prostitutes, and early hominids, and we see that walking is always a socio-political act. As with all good journeys, the book has something new and exciting around every corner; an alluring view or intriguing perspective.
Solnit is a smart writer, and Wanderlust is a love letter to the art of putting one foot in front of the other. It also spawned an entire genre of books on the subject, and not many authors can claim that!
A passionate, thought provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence
Drawing together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores--Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most…
The Old Ways is an intimate and soulful book about journeys along many paths.
It is a glorious songline to the ancient network of tracks that lace across the land, mainly in the British Isles, from trails across the bogs of Dartmoor, to the tidal path of the ‘Broomway’ in Essex, to the routes around the herders’ huts on the Isle of Lewis. Paths that were walked into existence by generations of people and animals.
Macfarlane delights in the language of movement and the sensory nature of it, as well as in the landscapes themselves, so that the sum of the book is far greater than the individual paths. For me, Macfarlane is the best of modern nature writers, and The Old Ways is the best of Macfarlane.
The acclaimed author of The Wild Places and Underland examines the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move
Chosen by Slate as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years
In this exquisitely written book, which folds together natural history, cartography, geology, and literature, Robert Macfarlane sets off to follow the ancient routes that crisscross both the landscape of the British Isles and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the voices that haunt old paths and the stories our tracks tell. Macfarlane's journeys take…
Walking as thinking has a long history, traced back at least to the Peripatetics of Ancient Greece, and this Socratic tradition is seen in more recent thinkers, writers, and poets. This is the central theme of the French philosopher Frédéric Gros’s book A Philosophy of Walking.
It is two things: an examination of the philosophy of various great thinkers, from Rousseau to Kant, Nietzsche to Thoreau. But it is also a manifesto on the nature of walking itself, whether a ramble, a march, or a parade.
Gros’s writing is short, to the point, and clinical, and this makes it beautiful in its precision and simplicity. Like an extended poem. It also gives the book a profundity so that reading it becomes a tremendous trip of discovery.
It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth. - Nietzsche
By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.
In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frederic Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B-the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble-and reveals what they say…
I love a good walk! And so does Geoff Nicholson who sets out his love of it in a series of essays that make up his book The Lost Art of Walking.
These walking tales tell stories about pedestrianism in literature, art, and film; how it has been an inspiration to the likes of Bob Dylan, Charles Dickens, and Buster Keaton. But Nicholson also brings in some interesting perspectives from science and philosophy on the act of walking.
Written in a chatty, journalistic style, Nicholson is a pleasant and witty recontour to have on these journeys, he is informative and quite often irreverent, and there is plenty of humour thrown in to keep the footsteps light and the journey trotting at a good pace.
How we walk, where we walk, why we walk tells the world who and what we are. Whether it's once a day to the car, or for long weekend hikes, or as competition, or as art, walking is a profoundly universal aspect of what makes us humans, social creatures, and engaged with the world. Cultural commentator, Whitbread Prize winner, and author of Sex Collectors Geoff Nicholson offers his fascinating, definitive, and personal ruminations on the literature, science, philosophy, art, and history of walking.
Nicholson finds people who walk only at night, or naked, or in the shape of a cross…
For me the best book on walking is by the German film director Werner Herzog.
In 1974 Herzog was told that his friend, the film historian Lotte Eisner, was dying. In what can perhaps be described as a fugue state Herzog pulled on his boots, grabbed a jacket and compass, and set off on a monumental, almost shamanic, journey from his home in Munich to her deathbed in Paris, believing his act of walking would keep her alive.
The journey took three weeks and Herzog walked through the thick of winter. On arrival, Eisner had already recovered. Of Walking in Ice is Herzog’s diary charting this incredible pilgrimage. Tender, beautiful, and genuinely insightful, I’ve read this short book over and over again. It’s probably time I read it again!
In late November 1974, filmmaker Werner Herzog received a phone call from Paris delivering some terrible news. German film historian, mentor, and close friend Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and dying. Herzog was determined to prevent this and believed that an act of walking would keep Eisner from death. He took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag of the barest essentials, and wearing a pair of new boots, set off on a three-week pilgrimage from Munich to Paris through the deep chill and snowstorms of winter."Of Walking in Ice" is Herzog's beautifully written, much-admired, yet often-overlooked diary account…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Each of the sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also a view of ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even bullfighting in Spain is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through…
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