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Book Cover for: Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert MacFarlane

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Robert MacFarlane

Reader Score

86%

86% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 35 reviews on

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The New York Times Best Seller
2019 The New York Times Best Seller

In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time--from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come--Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.

Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.

Book Details

  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
  • Publish Date: Aug 18th, 2020
  • Pages: 496
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.40in - 1.30in - 0.85lb
  • EAN: 9780393358094
  • Categories: Ecosystems & Habitats - MountainsEarth Sciences - GeologyEnvironmental Conservation & Protection - General

About the Author

MacFarlane, Robert: - Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people, and place. His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind; they have been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally best-selling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

Profound in every sense of the word.--Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory
An excellent book--fearless and subtle, empathic and strange.--Dwight Garner "New York Times"
Reading Macfarlane connects us to dazzling new worlds. It's a connection that brings, more than anything else, joy.--Barbara J. King "NPR"
Remarkable...Underland may be [Macfarlane's] masterpiece.--Colin Thubron "New York Review of Books"
One of the most ambitious works of narrative non-fiction of our age.--William Dalrymple "Guardian"
[Robert Macfarlane's] writing is luminous, intense....[B]rilliant notes from the underground.--Huw Lewis-Jones "Nature"
[Macfarlane] seems to metabolize landscape into lyrics as he walks.--Rachel Riederer "Outside"
Through this series of haunting descents, Macfarlane plumbs the strange and alarming ways we've changed the world and resurfaces with revelations about how to orient us to the future, weaving landscape and language together.--Kate Yoder "Grist"
The most impressive exercise of imagination and scholarship I've come across lately....A reader never will forget this journey through geologic time.--Tony Norman "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"
With Underland Macfarlane gives us a work of nature writing for the age--and for the ages. Its eloquent but urgent prose reveals our complex relationship with nature while pushing us to think more deeply about earth's sublime underneath.--Amy Brady "Gizmodo"