Customer Reviews

Crossing Open Ground

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This collection of essays is glorious and sad. The writing lets the reader see what Barry Lopez is seeing with so few precise words. The gifts of wilderness are felt while reading sentences like, "You could feel the creek vibrating in the silt and sand.". The saddness comes from knowing these essays were written in the 1980's and so much more has been destroyed since then.

Due to when this book was written, there are a couple of references to former President Reagan's "environmental record" written in real time.

There were so many essays that I loved, including the one speaking of traveling the river with Paul Winter. I am going to quote a passage from "Children in the Woods".

"The quickest door to open in the woods for a child is the one that leads to the smallest room, by knowing the name each thing is called. The door that leads to the cathedral is marked by a hesitancy to speak at all, rather to encourage by example a sharpness of the senses. If one speaks it should only be to say, as well as one can, how wonderfully all this fits together, to indicate what a long, fierce peace can derive from this knowledge."

Lopez is concerned with our collective understanding of nature. From studying a 3000-year-old horse intaglio to looking for Anasazi granaries he seeks our ancestral relationships. The essays work best when he mixes his reflection with keen observations. Where the essays have a heavier philosophical hand they aren't as effective. As he says "The door that leads to the cathedral is marked by a hesitancy to speak at all, rather to encourage by example, a sharpness of the senses". Lopez 's narratives sharpen many senses from the sudden assault of the sound of snow geese to "two snails small as pinheads chewing a leaf".

There are reflections on the role of biologists, from communicating between scientists and shipmates in the arctic to their role in a whale stranding. Perhaps he thinks biologists have greater insight, but he also understands the need for mystery and direct experience.

For Paul Winter fans there is a description of the raft down the Grand Canyon that produced the album "Canyon". As a current update, the snow geese written about in one essay are continuing to boom and damage their arctic breeding grounds.

Excellent reading for those connected with the Earth. Food for the soul. One of the best gifts I have ever recieved.

Spiritually uplifting, poetic essays by an amazing nature writer with such a deep connection to the land. At least the 5th Barry Lopez book I've savored.

Have you read any Barry Lopez? Do you enjoy learning about the American landscape and what lives there? Are you interested in fine, artistic prose mixed with a keen knowledge and observation of nature? This man is a wonderful writer who will make you feel and learn. Crossing Open Ground is an easy and fast read great for a weekend away from winter's dark days, a warm bath, a wait at an airport...OK, anywhere at any time. If you have never read any Lopez start now; you will not be disappointed. If you have read him but wonder about this book... I have read three of his others and this one stands with them all.

Patrick Michael Murphy
ACROSS THE DESPERATE MILES

This wonderful book's authorized publisher in the US is only Charles Scribner's Sons--not Peter Smith. What's the story with this?