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A Deep Time Journey
by Robert Macfarlane
Book Reviewed by:From the best-selling, award-winning author of Landmarks and The Old Ways, a haunting voyage into the planet's past and future.
Hailed as "the great nature writer of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), Robert Macfarlane is the celebrated author of books about the intersections of the human and the natural realms. In Underland, he delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.
In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestseller The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through "deep time"―the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present―he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. "Woven through Macfarlane's own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the underland made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls "the awful darkness within the world."
Global in its geography and written with great lyricism and power, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. Taking a deep-time view of our planet, Macfarlane here asks a vital and unsettling question: "Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?" Underland marks a new turn in Macfarlane's long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart. From its remarkable opening pages to its deeply moving conclusion, it is a journey into wonder, loss, fear, and hope. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.
Excerpt unavailable.
Macfarlane profiles people who champion earth's remotest regions and, as he lyrically describes, the wonders that can be found everywhere on Earth—not only at its highest summits but also in its most mysterious and unknowable depths...continued
Full Review
(691 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Andrea Wulf
Robert Macfarlane is a magician with words. In Underland he shows us how to see in the dark. His writing is like a vortex…once caught, you're pulled deeper and deeper with each page. Diane Ackerman
Beautifully written and wise, this haunting book is a treasure by one of earth's keenest celebrants. Its unique spell is irresistible. Francisco Cantú
Robert Macfarlane has long provided us with some of the most distinctive and sensitive thinking about how humans understand and experience the terrestrial world. In turning his attention to the subterranean in Underland, he has delivered his most urgent, universal, and expansive book yet Lauren Groff
Underland is a devastating act of witness, a clear, cogent, lyrical examination of the darknesses invisible beneath our feet, both geographical and eschatological; it is blazingly vivid about the terror and grandeur of both the natural world and the consequences of human destructiveness upon the Earth. But the book's great power comes from Robert Macfarlane's deliberate turn away from despair and a simple narrative of human evildoing, and toward a more deliberate, loving, and luminous sense of awe. Philip Gourevitch
Robert Macfarlane writes of his astonishing subterranean explorations with such wondrous, indelible power that you remember what he sees as if you saw it yourself. Underland is a profound reckoning with humankind's self-imperiled position in nature's eternal order. At once thrilling and soulful, raw and erudite, it is a book of revelations. Philip Pullman
Robert Macfarlane's writing reminds us of the astonishing variety of things you can see when you go at walking speed, and of how strange and rich the world is. Rebecca Solnit
I began this book with the thrill of realizing that Robert Macfarlane has over the years and books charted the heights and breadth of human travel before plumbing the depths in this exquisite book about what lies beneath. I ended it with wonder at his ability to evoke so vividly places to which I and probably you will never go, and the sense of vast scale they restore to us at a time when it can feel like the world has shrunken around us.
I am incredibly claustrophobic, so reading Robert Macfarlane's Underland didn't make me particularly inclined to follow in his footsteps. But some readers may be inspired by the places he describes so vividly and want to do a little underland exploring of their own. Many of them are so remote (or dangerous, or illegal) that they'd be inaccessible for all but the most intrepid explorers; but if you do find yourself longing to head below the earth, here are some dramatic and fascinating underground places you can more easily visit:
If you liked Underland, try these:
by Judith Schalansky
Published 2021
Each disparate object described in this book - a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific - shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail.
by Lamorna Ash
Published 2021
From an adventurous and discerning new voice reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane, a captivating portrait of a community eking out its living in a coastal landscape as stark and storied as it is beautiful.
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