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80th out of 355 books
—
276 voters
Landscape And Memory
by
Simon Schama
One of Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year
In Landscape and Memory Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist...more
In Landscape and Memory Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist...more
Paperback, 672 pages
Published
November 5th 1996
by Vintage
(first published January 1st 1995)
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I read this a long time ago, and didn't find it easy to read, but oh! so very worthwhile when I finally made it to Europe and could see the places he was writing about. It really makes a difference when you are tramping through all those palaces when you understand the political purpose and symbolism behind the architecture and gardens.
I summarised each chapter as I read, but I'm not going to regurgitate that here. What I remember is all sorts of odd things - here's just one example: how the Br...more
I summarised each chapter as I read, but I'm not going to regurgitate that here. What I remember is all sorts of odd things - here's just one example: how the Br...more
Landscape and Memory is a long book. It is hard not to be impressed by the shear number of pages Simon Schama can put out. And his subject matter - the cultural perception of landscape and its use in national discourses - is one I enjoy. This is an incredibly broad-brush view of the subject, meandering through Lithuanian forests to Bernini's fountains and the gardens at Versaille, then on to Mount Rushmore, to name a small sampling of the locations he grazes. There are wonderful passages in this...more
A fully engrossing, but very long book. I like art, I like history, and I really like Simon Schama, so using the transitive property, I guess I really liked this book. I would caution potential readers, however, that it is not a book that can be read lightly. After finishing it, I have decided to treat myself to the softer ramblings of Chuck Klosterman.
By the way, I have shelved this in the american history shelf because there are some references to the United States and its landcape and history...more
By the way, I have shelved this in the american history shelf because there are some references to the United States and its landcape and history...more
My rating of this book is a result of contradictory responses to this work and its production. A 'big' book, it also weighs over 1.6 kg — not easy to carry around... and the comparatively large size of the page makes one tremble occasionally at masses of words in solid blocks... Fortunately, much of the book is broken up with illustrations. But the feeling overall is 'big' and 'heavy'.
The notes at the back tell us that this work is in fact an accumulation of lectures given at various locations b...more
The notes at the back tell us that this work is in fact an accumulation of lectures given at various locations b...more
About a year ago, I was watching Animal Plant or the National Geographic channel. I can't remember which one. Anyhow, there was this American, you know the kind that makes all Americans cringe. He was going in some cave filled with water and bat poop to look at snakes. He made this poor snake barf up its meal of bat to prove that snakes kill bats in the dark. He let the snake back in the murk, and a couple minutes got bite by a snake (if there is any justice, the same snake). The snake wasn't po...more
This book is a fascinating treatise on the role nature (specifically wood, water, and rock) has played in Western culture. Art and history professor at Columbia University, Schama considered this the one book he needed to write. He expertly touches on so many examples of our environment's influence on our collective memory that the book is difficult to describe- everything from Hitler's obsession with the forests of Europe and the battles fought to get Susan B. Anthony on Mount Rushmore, to West...more
La mémoire est un art difficile. trop souvent elle n'est quélaboration visant à donner sens à un présent. Trop souvent elle refoule.
Le livre de Simon Schama est remarquable d'érudition et d'intelligence de l'histoire. A chaque page nous nous instruisons. Nous apprenons qu'un paysage vierge même de ruines peut cependant renfermer sa part de mémoire.
C'est que l'auteur a une connaissance inouie des représentations, de ces constructions mentales qui ont jalonné l'histoire de l'humanité. A la jointur...more
Le livre de Simon Schama est remarquable d'érudition et d'intelligence de l'histoire. A chaque page nous nous instruisons. Nous apprenons qu'un paysage vierge même de ruines peut cependant renfermer sa part de mémoire.
C'est que l'auteur a une connaissance inouie des représentations, de ces constructions mentales qui ont jalonné l'histoire de l'humanité. A la jointur...more
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This book brought out a lot of things for me: issues of anthropocentrism, how do we get out of it? Can we get out of it? Can we talk about the experiences of creatures or things that are not human without anthropocentrising them? Can we anthropocentrisize them and be aware that we are doing so? To what degree is this self awareness acceptable?
Schama focused more on the memory than the landscape, which is fine, but his thesis was lost and not resolved. This was a book about men on land, not man a...more
Schama focused more on the memory than the landscape, which is fine, but his thesis was lost and not resolved. This was a book about men on land, not man a...more
This is one of my all time favourite books. Schama's book is bursting with ideas about the meanings of different types of landscape in different places, and the ways these meanings are reflected in stories (legends, myths, folk stories etc) and the visual arts. It changed the way I see the world and enriched my life as a consequence.
No matter how cluttered our bookshelves get, this will always be in my collection.
No matter how cluttered our bookshelves get, this will always be in my collection.
I love this book. The breadth of Simon Schama's interests and knowledge is astounding. The book is packed with revelations and insights. It is beautiflly written and structured. It combines the delight of reading wonderful prose and the pleasure of learning. This is a book I will read and re-read with the certain knowledge that every time I open it I will learn something new.
Kind of meanders around, but one of the more thought-provoking books I have ever read. Mr. Schama really drives home the fact that until the last century, century and a half, the western world thought all wilderness to be ugly, of not downright sinful. So they wanted to do away with it or at least make it look nice, and we still have that tendency today.
Man creates myths around which political, religious and social activities cohere. Many of these deal with the relationship of a people to nature; for example the English and the sea, the Germans and the forest, Romany (gypsies) and the road. Schama uses art and artists as the media through which he explores these myths.
Lacks focus - Schama can and will use any bit of history or tangent to illustrate broad themes which could have been condensed into a long article. This is entertaining at times, like watching a talented college professor that's very stoned riff on history for hour after hour. But it's a 672 page book.
I really wanted to like this book, instead it wore me down. Others have covered well what is great about it. I will say only that Schama seemed to have been missing an editor. It took over two years to read, in the end I finished it out of shear doggedness.
Great ideas buried inside alot of extra writing.
Great ideas buried inside alot of extra writing.
Charlton Heston in his forced interview with Michael Moore reminded us all that Europe had a frontier, too. It's easy to forget this simple point. Schama looks at the art of the 18th and 19th centuries and shows how romanticism emerges from the art of this period. He argues that we are have been taught to look at nature in a certain way, and he then asks all of us where our feeling and thoughts about nature came from. I think the most ardent tree hugger or environmentalist has to return to the R...more
I gave this a hundred pages or so before I gave up. Just not engrossing, which made me sad since Simon Schama is my favorite art documentary host EVER. What a fantastic thinker and historian. But his quirkiness does not come through in a 600 page historical novel based around the idea of landscape and landscape paintings. Sorry Simon Schama. I am still in love with your movies!
In school, it never bothered me to read academic texts, books that read like they are either written by or for academicians. I'm not in school at the moment and that same specie of literature, including Simon Schama's meditation on landscape and art and, let's be frank, filling up pages with words -this type of book reads like coursework and too often I stopped and asked myself what class I was in. The realization that I was not still enrolled in academe was both a relief and, vis a vis Mr Scham...more
One of my instructor's provided us with a copy of the 19 page introduction. Really looking forward to reading this one day!! Can't believe how much it ties in with a paper I wrote last quarter! Love seeing though how all our course work continually ties together.
A big book, well illustrated and rich in anecdote (I particularly like the one about Whitebait in 18th century British politics). As a whole though it feels inconclusive, I understand that it originated as a lecture course which might explain that.
Such an erudite excursion through the history of man's engagement with his physical environment. Schama entertains us by his selections of persons/events, and fascinates us with his prose, at times poetic.
Utterly beguiling accounts giving a tangible sense of space and place. Level of scholarship and detail remarkable. Must have a small army of researchers at work.
A very deep read. This book restitches the fabric of many various regions by wandering through history to better understand and appreciate those specific landscapes.
I have the first edition... and as a plein air painter, I especially found Ch 9 Arcadia Redesigned informative. It's a go back to book in my library.
This is rich and dense, displaying a breadth of scholarship that is humbling. Bits of the book are outstanding, but my prinvipal concern is that Schama does not seem to effctively distinguish representations of the landscape as things to be looked at (visual and plastic arts) from repesentaitons of the landscape made to be occupied (such as garden design). whereas both are representations, the difficulty I find with not making this distinction clear is that we experience them differently - this...more
A sweeping exploration of the effects of the natural world on human culture. One of my favorite books!
didn't actually read it cover to cover. used passages for research. the passages that supported my thesis.
I can't say I read the whole book... but an excellent meditation on landscape in history and art
This is a long and rambling book, but that’s okay. He explores the notion of myth and culture relating to landscape, that in turn reoccurs through time in different forms. Divided into broad sections on wood, rock and water this is a very rich and varied account from the dark forests of Germany to Italian fountains. Packed with anecdote and stories of both the eccentric and sublime I would strongly recommend this book.
The more important book, in history and history of art, for the 21e century
Jun 14, 2009
Sandy
is currently reading it
another good book i can't get rolling on. over 6 years--still not finished
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Simon Schama was born in 1945. The son of a textile merchant with Lithuanian and Turkish grandparents, he spent his early years in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. When his parents moved to London he won a scholarship to Haberdashers’ Aske’s School where his two great loves were English and History. Forced to choose between the two he opted to read history at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Here he was taught...more
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Jul 06, 2010 05:12pm