Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage From Andalusia to the Hebrides [Hardcover]

John Hanson Mitchell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2002

An entrancing, sun-drenched bicycle journey, from the beaches of southern Spain to solar temples in the Outer Hebrides. In this great feast of armchair travel, John Hanson Mitchell tells of his fifteen-hundred-mile ride on a trusty old Peugeot bicycle from the port of Cadiz to just below the Arctic Circle. He follows the European spring up through southern Spain, the wine and oyster country near Bordeaux, to Versailles (the palace of the "Sun King"), Wordsworth's Lake District, precipitous Scottish highlands, and finally to a Druid temple on the island of Lewis in the Hebrides, a place where Midsummer is celebrated in pagan majesty as the near-midnight sun dips and then quickly rises over the horizon. In true John Mitchell fashion this journey is interspersed with myth, natural history, and ritual, all revolving around the lure and lore of the sun, culturally and historically. The journey is as delicious as it is fascinating, with an appeal for all those who look south in February and are drawn to dunes, picnics under castle walls, spring flowers, terraced vineyards, Moorish outposts, magic and celebrations. In short, to everything under the sun. A Merloyd Lawrence Book

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After last year's The Wildest Place on Earth, the caustic travel writer picked up his knapsack, pumped up his Peugeot and set out once again on the back roads. This time Mitchell cycled from the southern plains of Andalusia, in Spain, to Scotland's northernmost isles, chasing the encroaching summer in search of our only pantheistic deity, the sun. Appropriately, the text is most evocative in the indolent stretches of the sun-washed south, and Mitchell's penchant for reported speech offers a fascinating picture of Europe. His Spain is warm and effusive, his France lazy, rich and proud; England he likes less, and he struggles to find merit amid the smalltown claustrophobia of southern Albion. But the lonely wilderness and secluded hills of Scotland are most attractive to Mitchell, who prefers the company of his bicycle to that of other people. Awkwardly, it is Mitchell's preference for solitude that mars his typically generous prose, for he is surprisingly judgmental about other cultures and habitually moralizes about the laissez-faire lifestyles of his expat friends. Uncomfortable, too, is his almost overbearingly poetic narrative style, saved from whimsy only by erudite interjections on sun worship through time. This is a staggering journey, a spatial and temporal trek through centuries of heliocentric faith, where the author encounters everyone from New Age archeologists to luminist painters and naturalist bathers, united only in their adulation of the one true sun.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

John Hanson Mitchell is the author of The Wildest Place on Earth, Ceremonial Time, and Trespassing and the editor of Sanctuary, the journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Winner of the 1994 John Burroughs Essay Award, he received the 2000 New England Booksellers' Award for his body of work. He lives in Littleton, Massachusetts.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Edition edition (May 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582431361
• ISBN-13: 978-1582431369
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,150,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Hanson Mitchell's earlier work is focused on a square mile tract of land known as Scratch Flat, located about thirty-five miles north-west of Boston. Mitchell has used this anomalous landscape of rolling hills, farms, forests and encroaching suburbs to explore his continuing interest in natural and human history and the whole question of place in human cultures,both native and European. Best known of this series of books is the first, Ceremonial Time:Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile.

Later books explore the relationship between culture, nature, and place. These works deal with such disparate subjects as the relationship between Italian gardens and the American wilderness and the role of the sun in various cultures, outlined in the book Following the Sun, a 1500 mile bicycle journey he made from Cadiz in Spain, north to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. His latest book, The Paradise of all These Parts, is a natural history of the little peninsula that became the city of Boston.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Biking Towards the Sun Hits High Gear, January 28, 2005

By 

Bohdan Kot (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage From Andalusia to the Hebrides (Hardcover)

John Hanson Mitchell, editor of "Sanctuary," the journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, begins riding a 40-year-old-plus Peugeot bicycle north on the first day of spring in southern Spain. The hopeful destination (a 1,500 mile trek) is to arrive in the Hebrides (Scotland) on the first day of summer.

"Following the Sun" offers more than bicycle-travel stories. A history of sun worshipers through the ages such as the Aztecs, Incas and several other sun cultures are discussed.
A delightful and eccentric bunch of characters along Mitchell's route lighten the didactic tone of the book. A speaker from the Flat Earth Society preaches in a confident manner to an ever-growing hostile crowd in Hyde Park. An overly protective bed and breakfast manager repeatedly dissuades Mitchell from riding to Scotland. She shouts, "You'll die of exposure in the empty wind like a poor lamb. No one in their right mind ventures out to the Hebrides . . . You'll be speared and eaten."

Mitchell's view from the bicycle seat is brought into one's imagination easily thanks to the author's keen eye for detail. We also experience his roadside pasture rest stops; he writes, "sliced my `tomates,' onions, and sardines, tore off a tranche of bread, and uncorked a bottle of Sancerre." One empathizes with the enjoyment of such a simple meal after having taken part of the arduous bike-ride with the writer rider.

"Following The Sun" proves to be a contagious read; an immense sense of passion flows through each page. Wanderlust will even ignite the soul of timid travelers to ramble through the book as if competing in the "Tour de France."

Bohdan Kot

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Makes me yearn for Spain and France, May 21, 2003

By 

B. Yankee "Human being" (Shrewsbury, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage From Andalusia to the Hebrides (Hardcover)

John Hanson Mitchell recounts his travels by bike from Southern Spain through France and England finally ending up in Scotland all the while musing on the sun and the indelible mark it has left on our culture. The book is part travelogue, part philosophical musing, part anthropological study, part religious mediation. The accounts of the people and places he encountered are compelling and his descriptions of the food he ate along the way made me very hungry! It all adds up to a thought-provoking and entertaining read.

A couple of quibbles: It would have been great if there was a map included with the book that showed the route traveled. Mitchell writes eloquently about the geography and it's hard to visualize it without having a map handy (unless of course you are very familiar with the regions he's writing about). I also found it somewhat disturbing that it wasn't clear when exactly this journey took place. The book came out last year or the year before,but it seems that the actual trip took place long ago.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The perfect summer read!, August 11, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage From Andalusia to the Hebrides (Hardcover)

Whoever wrote that review that you say was in Publisher's Weekly obviously never read anything by John Hanson Mitchell! They must be confusing him with some other author. Mitchell's writing is always so good-hearted and generous--the opposite of caustic!
Following the Sun is so rich--a journey on two levels; a review of virtually everything under the sun, from myth to bird migration to the solar origins of Christianity. But it's also a delightful bicycle ride--all the way from the south of Spain to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland with journeys throughout the vineyards of Bordeaux, the chateaux of the Loire in France and the stone circles of the British Isles in between. Mitchell always has a way of falling in with eccebntric types, as I've seen in his other books eg. Ceremonial Time (a 15,000 year history of one square mile of land)and The Wildest Place on Earth (about Italian gardens and the American wilderness). He seems to be able to mix arcane facts about the setting of sugar in winegrapes, and the perversities of Roman emperors and the like with a sharp ear for story. There are some great ones here with some rollicking Old World characters. The author followed back roads all the way, and he did it before the establishment of the European Union when all the food was better, the wine sweeter, and the stories deeper. And Mitchell's writing style, lyrical and smooth, is a salve for whatever ails you. What a pleasure!