HORIZON

A celebration and investigation of the impulse to explore, Horizon is itself an exploration—of both the human and inhuman worlds. In his intensity, his clarity, and his capacity for wonder, Barry Lopez is unmatched. —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction

Barry Lopez is a straight-up magnificent writer. To read Horizon is to be transported to wondrous landscapes far beyond the pale, and thereby obtain an astounding perspective on our increasingly uncertain future. Lopez expresses faith that our species can avert annihilation by investing ‘more deeply in the philosopher's cardinal virtues': courage, justice, reverence, and compassion—virtues this book possesses in abundance. (Jon Krakauer, bestselling author of Into the Wild and Under the Banner of Heaven)

UK: The Bodley Head; Spain: Capitan Swing; Canada: Penguin Random House;

Horizon is magnificent; a contemporary epic, at once pained and urgent, personal and oracular. (Robert Macfarlane) Read more...

'Horizon' is beautiful and brutal, uplifting and bleak, a story of the universal human condition set in some of the most distinctive places on earth. “We are the darkness,” Lopez writes, “as we are, too, the light.” Read more...

An essential voice in American writing. Barry Lopez's stories of inquiry and discovery are gloriously riveting, bringing the reader into a research boat, an archaeological site, a night-tent conversation, water forty feet under the edge of an ice shelf. At each place where he turns his eye and mind, something is learned of existence's richness and meaning. A master work. This book is a map to treasures everywhere buried. —Jane Hirshfield, poet, essayist, and translator

The long-awaited follow-up to the classic Arctic Dreams by the American environmental writer takes the reader almost pole to pole, across extraordinary landscapes and decades of lived experience. (Guardian column 'What You'll be Reading This Year')

A globe-trotting nature writer meditates on the fraught interactions between people and ecosystems in this sprawling environmentalist travelogue...readers will be captivated.

Ever since he won the National Book Award in 1986 for Arctic Dreams, his transcendentally beautiful book about the arctic circle, Barry Lopez has been working on another book...In his pages, through his journeys, the center is always the horizon. By staring at it—alongside many other people from places a long ways from his own Oregon—Lopez shows us what we gain when we respect the enormity of what we don't know, and also what we'd lose were we to erase nature's ways of knowing. (“Most Anticipated Books of 2019”)

A winning memoir...Lopez has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galapagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world...The author's chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as ‘a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite'—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades...Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers. (starred review)

Riveting, seductive, and beautifully written. I don't know of any other writer who so mesmerizingly, so seemingly effortlessly, weaves together art, science and poetry—I found myself underlining sentences on every page. Barry Lopez is one of my literary heroes. (Andrea Wulf)

No one has worked harder to make sense of our present civilization than Barry Lopez, and in these chronicles we get to share the travels that helped shape his extraordinary mind and heart. A great gift to us all. —Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and author of The End of Nature

The world is vast, and so are the heart and the curiosity of Barry Lopez. His voice is incomparable and necessary. No one else alive, to my knowledge, thinks so carefully about the moral dimensions of landscape.—David Quammen, science, nature, and travel writer, and author of The Tangled Tree

Nobody journeys like Barry Lopez. He's humble, he's ethical, he's honest, he's curious, he's doubtful, he's properly sad and he's wild. He wakes us up to the worth and the mystery of the world. His great affection for humanity comes up from every patch of earth he visits. This is an epic book that goes from pole to pole, and yet manages to make a distinct ‘everywhere' out of each little patch he visits. A glorious book, gloriously told. —Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin and Thirteen Ways of Looking

Revelatory...Attentive in the world, rigorous on the page, morally inquisitive and bracingly candid, Lopez is a writer of conscience who illuminates the nexus between natural and human history. In his most encompassing, autobiographical, passionately detailed, and reflective book—a life's travelogue—he shares memories, stories, observations, concerns, condemnations, and hope. ‘Each place on earth goes deep,' writes Lopez, as does he. He poses tough questions, and shares wisdom, all while looking to the horizon, ‘the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.' (starred review)