Horizon

Written by Barry Lopez

Narrated by James Naughton

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
THE NEW YORK TIMES • NPR • THE GUARDIAN

From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.
 
Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781984889034

Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez (1945–2020) was the author of thirteen books of essays, short stories, and nonfiction. He was a recipient of the National Book Award, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous other literary and cultural honors and awards. His highly acclaimed books include Arctic Dreams, Winter Count, and Of Wolves and Men, for which he received the John Burroughs and Christopher medals. He lived in western Oregon.

Reviews for Horizon

[kcshankd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Just devastating, his final work. Read after reading about his final days in Granta. Lopez takes us along on his usual treks and wanderings, re-covering some old ground. He wonders about the future, poses hard unanswered questions about warming & fascism.

To learn he lost his home and work to one of Oregon's rampaging fires in the summer of 2020 just before his death is almost too much.

We are right to worry.

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the first book I read by Lopez. It took a while to get used to his style, but I came to like it. Each chapter is a different place he has traveled in the past 50 years. Apparently it repeats some places from previous works, but the writing is all new. The early chapters are also a min-biography of his early life. The writing straddles art and science, the known and the mysterious, there is a great sense of wonder and amazement of the natural world. There is also a current of foreboding, existential dread about the future, even going as far as wondering if living people today will survive out natural lives to old age. Lopez sees a lack of empathy as a core problem. This is a lengthy generous book at times beautiful and profound. It would be easy to criticize because he is among the elite with privileges most of us will never have, but the quality of writing and overall message it is hard to disagree.