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About This Life

Barry Lopez

4.14 · Rating details · 901 ratings · 102 reviews

Once, when asked for advice on how to become a writer, Lopez found himself replying: "Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar." This collection of essays stems directly from that philosophy. Here is far-flung travel (the beauty of remote Hokkaido Island, the over-explored Galápagos, enigmatic Bonaire); a naturalist's concerns (for endangered commu ...more

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Paperback, 304 pages

Published May 1st 1999 by The Harvill Press (first published May 19th 1998)

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Feb 18, 2021 John rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: bio-and-memoir, ebooks, library_books, travel

I aim to get across that I'm gushing and ranting about these essays; however, no need for lots of exclamations and such.

Proof? I'm definitely not into ones focusing on nature, but those here had me completely hooked. One I found especially powerful was simply titled "Hands" in which he discussed life through hands, his own and others' - outstanding!

Read.
This.
Book.
Now! ...more

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Aug 31, 2017 Daniel Chaikin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

36. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez
published: 1998
format: 273 page Paperback
acquired: from Downtown Books & News in Asheville, NC, in 2014
read: Aug 16-31
rating: 3½

A collection of essays with a nature-writer's tone. I had to work through a few things before I could begin to understand where he was going.

Since Lopez is considered a nature writer, I was maybe a little confused by what I found and by what aspects did and did not appeal to me in this essay collecti ...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Jamie rated it liked it

Recommends it for: Daniel Villines

Shelves: nature-walk, non-fiction, activism-and-justice, the-wild-west, on-story

At the intersection of that Venn diagram of my interests— community and storytelling and wilderness— here sits this book. There are some great essays here— on memory, on art, on biology and geography— and some fascinating subjects— like the essay, “Flight,” his first-hand account of riding shotgun on the boggling logistics of our global economy, or “Orchids on the Volcanos,” on the reality of the present-day Galápagos Islands, or “The Whaleboat,” on whaling from Melville and Moby-Dick to Greely ...more

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Sep 22, 2011 Jessica rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, nonfiction, geography, memoir

I don't know, of course, whether you've ever been in the high Arctic in the summer, but I would begin by telling you how striking the light is. For two months or more the sun doesn't dip below the horizon. In a treeless, winter-hammered landscape like Alaska's north slope, the light creates a feeling of compassion that is almost palpable. Each minute of light experienced feels like one stolen from a crushing winter. You walk gently about, respectful of plants, with a sense of how your body brea ...more

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Aug 12, 2012 Cheryl rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-of-the-best-of-the-best-100

Not many books of essays bring me to tears. I was affected in almost every synapse in my brain and every emotion in my heart; this was perfection in language, in heart, in science, in exploration and adventure, in deep, real connections between strangers, in anthropological examinations of tribes and people; perfection in being attuned to every holy and sacred place, thing and moment in the world; and, and, and, his being able to verbalize it so so so exquisitely. Gush, gush, gush. An anonymous Not many books of essays bring me to tears. I was affected in almost every synapse in my brain and every emotion in my heart; this was perfection in language, in heart, in science, in exploration and adventure, in deep, real connections between strangers, in anthropological examinations of tribes and people; perfection in being attuned to every holy and sacred place, thing and moment in the world; and, and, and, his being able to verbalize it so so so exquisitely. Gush, gush, gush. An anonymous reviewer of Annie Dillard, my favorite revered author, wrote she was a “fine wayfarer, one who travels light, reflective and alert to the shrines and holy places,” and Melvin Maddocks further wrote of Dillard, “here is no gentle romantic twirling a buttercup.” I haven’t found anyone of Dillard’s equal in the way she affected everything in me, heart and head, until now. Every quote I have ever loved about Dillard, by Dillard, inspired by Dillard, easily attaches to Lopez in these essays. Lopez describes the absolute beauty of this world and simultaneously reminds us of the absolute terror of this world. He details the landscape of geography and the landscape of the heart and soul of the people that inhabit the geography. oh and so poetically.

While on a diving trip in the Caribbean (searching for depth in Bonaire), Lopez describes the unique and almost spiritual experience of diving:

"something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. it is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. it is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. it is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. it is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. it is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror."

I have never been scuba diving, but I love snorkeling, and swimming, and being in water, so I have experienced a taste of the above, but can’t it apply to all spiritual experience? Or physical experiences that engage more than one sense, even skydiving, or parachuting, skiing, hiking? Or even taking a walk at dusk with a glorious sunset? It is about being out of body and out of mind at the same time, which is like a therapy for many ills as well as what countless people seek from drugs and oblivion. For me, Lopez is describing a conscious oblivion that always has a texture of spirituality to me, whenever I feel “the intensity of life,” whether familiar or not. Just amen, and hallelujah. (And just a caveat: I am not at all religious. This is what makes Dillard so powerful to me, reclaiming the language of religion that glorifies god and glorifying nature, and people, and connection and thought.) Bravo, Mr. Lopez, bravo.

”I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. what I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. how were they related? what were the verbs? which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. no one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus?” someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY?”

Throughout the essays there were important things to learn. Lopez can almost make airplane engineering interesting (flight), the specifications for a pottery kiln (effleurage, the stroke of fire), and the architecture of both a real whaleboat that they used to hunt Moby Dick, and the replica one he keeps in his study that leads him to a mediation on light, life, and craftsmanship (the whaleboat). I prefer that he writes pages and pages of this stuff: brown bears and red foxes roam the mountains on the most northern Japanese island. (a short passage in northern Hokkaido) How did I never know there were brown bears in Japan? Are they genetically related to brown bears elsewhere, say, just over the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia? Or even farther away? Mr. Lopez, usually able to anticipate my questions, absolutely ignores my absolute disbelief that I did not know that bears lived in Japan and that we need further explanation as to their genetics and function, taxonomy and evolution. I guess that is another book. He interacts with an elder of Ainu tribe, the indigenous tribe of the area that suffered a similar fate as our Native tribes, and describes the absolute organic and holy process of trying to communicate with people who speak other languages, how much is conveyed with a gift, or a smile, or sharing food.

Who hasn’t wanted to travel to the Galapagos? (orchids on the volcanoes) This is where Lopez really demonstrates what he is after, and it is nothing less than you can imagine. “I’d looked out over a seared lava plain at the thin, desultory cover of leafless brush and thought, ‘in this slashing light there will be no peace.’” He is astonished that in a place that prior travelers had described as “holocaust-“ like and barren as “dragon-lair,” with an “inglorious panorama of Cretaceous beasts,” that he finds mist and fog, and something wholly unexpected, “a kind of tenderness about it: its stern volcanism, the Age of Dragons that persist here, eventually comes to seem benign rather than aberrant.” I get the need to pilgrimage to Utah every few years for the same exposure to badlands and otherworldly, other planetary-like vistas that feed something in me, something opposite of the peace that placid mountain streams feed on a more daily basis. (Maybe a trite metaphor, but accepting and seeking out the badlands of the heart or soul, a prereq and national holiday for me.)

(this essay uses the word archipelago so many times, I think I inhaled deeply each time, it is a reflexive meditative and Zen word for me…)

I could feel the past in this place, just by his words, and feel the absolute innovation and startling novelty of Darwin’s evolution. We grew up with it, it is as natural and on the tip of our tongues as gravity; but to the people of Darwin’s time and shortly after, it was thinking so new, so unbelievable, it must have broken open so many minds, opening them to the wonder and intensity of life. Lopez also writes about the economy and preservation of the Galapagos and how it affects and is affected by tourism, in a sobering way that makes me, again, simultaneously, want to visit and want to not visit. I want to leave us with the below imagery, but Lopez writes that his most vivid memory of Galapagos will be the storm petrel colony where he observed the birds being hunted by short-eared owls. The area was littered with pieces of bone, wings, feathers, and bodies of birds that starkly demonstrated the “flow of natural selection.” I practice, practice, and practice acceptance of the inevitable terror with the beauty, but choose always to focus on the beauty. While I don’t believe there is evil in nature, this quote of Wallace Stegner has always resonated on this topic: “wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.”

“In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort…because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. The sheer strength of Darwin’s insight into the development of biological life gently urges a visitor to be more than usually observant here- to notice, say, that while the thirteen Galapagean finches are all roughly the same hue, it is possible to separate them according to marked differences in the shapes of their bills and feeding habits.”

The following passage stands on its own (informed by indifference).

“The Wright and half a dozen other valleys in the Central Transantarctic Mountains are collectively referred to as the dry valleys. It has not rained here in two million years. No animal abides, no plant grows. A persistent, sometimes ferocious wind has stripped the country to stone and gravel, to streamers of sand. The huge valleys stand stark as empty fjords. You look in vain for any conventional sign of human history- the vestige of a protective wall, a bit of charcoal, a discarded arrowhead. Nothing. There is no history, until you bore into the layers of rock or until the balls of your fingertips run the rim of a partially exposed fossil. At the height of the austral summer, in December, you smell nothing but the sunbeaten stone. In a silence dense as water, your eye picks up no movement but the sloughing of sand, seeking its angle of repose.
On the flight in from New Zealand it had occurred to me, from what I had read and heard, that Antarctica retained Earth’s primitive link, however tenuous, with space, with the void that stretched out to Jupiter and Uranus. At the seabird rookeries of the Canadian Arctic or on the grasslands of the Serengeti, you can feel the vitality of the original creation; in the dry valleys you sense sharply what came before. The Archeozoic is like fresh spoor here.

I took several long walks in the Wright and adjacent Taylor Valleys. I did not feel insignificant on these journeys, dwarfed or shrugged off by the land, but superfluous. It is a difficult landscape to enter, and to develop a rapport with. It is not inimical or hostile, but indifferent, utterly remote, even as you stand in it. The light itself is aloof.

During the brief summer, it is warm enough for a few days or weeks to create meltwater; a few, inconsequential streams tumble down from the glaciers above the valleys. The sparking surface of the water is aberrant, a false promise, the land’s irony. The only really animate force here is the wind. It blows, always, from the interior, from the west- often, in the spring, at well over sixty knots. It wallops and scours the mountains, eroding and fracturing, sweeping clear the debris… the wind, a katabatic or gravity-driven wind, enters the valleys after falling vertically nearing two miles from the summit of the East Antarctic ice sheet; it comes into the valleys with a discernible hunger, and its effect on the land, which it abrades an lacerates with bits of sand and ice are often peculiar.”

The resulting rock sculptures are ventifacts. Google them. See: http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/d...
There are ponds in this land that never freeze despite -60 and -70 degree temperatures. They have so much salt and a mineral called antarcticite that they do not FREEZE IN WINTER. AT MINUS 60 DEGREES. CAPS DONE IN CASE THIS TRIVIA DOESN’T BLOW YOUR MIND. OPEN. WIDE OPEN. Before he finishes, in beauty, he writes about the scattered mummified seals that he stumbles across over and over; scientists do not know why they come so far inland but they die of starvation and are preserved and freeze-dried by the cold and wind. Online, there are pictures.

“Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.”

Taking a step back from the natural world, Lopez travels on forty flights accompanying various cargoes: horses from Chicago to Japan, tangerines from South Africa to Amsterdam, or paper money that come from currency exchanges all over the world. (flight.) Transoceanic pilots remark to him that the history of flight is so short, that they haven’t had a chance to name all the headwinds they encounter. They keep informal logs and hopes someone will sometime. About sunrise on a plane: “at 30,000 feet the sunrise clears the horizon about twenty-two minutes earlier than it does when seen from a spot on the earth directly below.” I didn’t know, but feel like I should have. Good trivia, but Lopez takes it further, of course. I told you he is alert and observant to more than just the holy landscapes, so he writes about flying alternate routes, avoiding hotspots like Iraq or Bosnia, but when they do fly over Afghanistan, they see trails of rocket fire and weaponry, and they know people are dying. At the same exact time, in the plane’s eye view, he looks to the east, and there is full moon rising over the Hindu Kush and to the southeast there are a hundred miles of lightning bolts and vertical rain on the horizon, and beyond all of this, a black sky with stars. And yet people are dying just below, and have been, and continue to. But so far, the wild, beautiful stars still shine.

“An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.”

One of my favorite essays is “The Whaleboat.” Lopez starts with a little snapshot of him reading a congressional report in his study, doing research for a book, on an expedition in the high Arctic in 1888. It is the original document, made of sheepskin, and the material is dark, depressing, about how most of the expedition died. But he looks up, and there is replica of a whaleboat, like Ahab’s in Moby Dick, that catches his eye, and the world outside the window that catches his eye, and we are off. He powerfully weaves a tapestry of moby dick, writing, light, forest, a window, a boat, the high seas, the high Arctic, exploring the landscape and philosophy. This and the Antarctica essay made me cry from their beauty and sense of words written for me at this point in my life, and isn’t that the undeniable proof that art is like breathing, that it affects and changes us, or at least good art. Just bravo, again, Mr. Lopez.

”I went down from the house in that hour, wearing the wet suit I use for tropical diving…since that day I have walked in the river in all seasons except late fall, winter, and early spring, when the water is too high…I’ve walked up and down it on moonlit nights, and on nights of the new moon when the only light falling in the woods has come from the bulb above my desk, that and photons from the stars above, the suns Ishmael imagined as islands in a “continentless,” continuous sea. Crabbing upcurrent some evenings, feeling the force of the water on my legs and a night breeze in my face, I often think of myself as passing the house offshore. Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood.”

“A string of memories about light as I observe it daily from this room, racing past in the mind’s corridors, would bind certain images. In the field below the house, a complicated splay of greens occurs more or less in the same ground plane: Himalaya blackberry, sword fern, wood sorrel, meadow rue, bracken fern, wild pea, tall blue lettuce, huckleberry, false Solomon seal, sweet cicely. The leaves and fronds of all these plants rotate so slowly through the day, tracking the sun through the forest canopy, the turning does not register as movement. It registers as a shift in the gamut of green.
Or consider how a rainstorm changes color and contrast in the forest by weighing it down. Water suspended on branches and individual leaves bends trees and plants to point at a sharper angle to the ground. When the water drains or evaporates, limbs rebound and shades of green on the ground become stronger as the limbs admit more light, and the somber darkness of the forest floor gives way to deeper color. Cleansed of natural dust, these greens gleam…

Or consider that light from a sun-shot sky flooding the canopy of a maple tree may be mistaken for a sheen brilliant on its leaves, the leaves in that moment mimicking the sky. And that in this configuration a greater volume of space surrounds the tree than if it is seen in the usual way, a dark-leafed tree against a pale sky.

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I’ve conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabulary, it seems, is infinite. The indispensable connection for me lies with the open space (of the open window ajar year round, never closed) that lets the breath of every winter storm, the ripping wind and its pelting rain, enter the room.

And what of the boat, where my glance still hangs? I imagine the six men in it in pursuit of something huge, cofounding, haunting. It instructs us in the infernal paradoxes of life.

When I look at the replica, when I imagine the oar blades plunged in the green transparency of the a storm-raked sea, the boat cranking off a wave crest, six men straining in drenched motley wool and oilskins, their mouths agape, I know that life is wild, dangerous, and beautiful.” ...more

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Jan 07, 2017 Quo rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Those who appreciate the complexity of language and see travel as a means of personal discovery

Shelves: wilderness-adventure, travel, personal-identity, reviewed

I have had previous encounters with Barry Lopez as an author and a speaker and am for the most part enthralled by his prose. However, rating an anthology, whether one filled with prose or with poetry, is a more difficult undertaking. Much of About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory is articulately phrased & even eloquent. One gropes for a manner in which to express an appreciation for the writing of Barry Lopez that will do him justice.

And yet I did find a few of the essays tiresome ...more

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Oct 07, 2009 Andi rated it really liked it

Lopez is one of those writers that every nonfiction writer is told to read. His name is on almost every page of the little stack of “Books You Should Read” lists that I keep in the right-hand cubby of my desk. Yet, here I am, just reading him for the first time. Okay, so maybe that’s not quite accurate. I think I read “The Eye of the Raven,” a selection from Desert Notes, in some anthology along the way of life, and it was really striking.

Thus, when I came across his book About This Life in some Lopez is one of those writers that every nonfiction writer is told to read. His name is on almost every page of the little stack of “Books You Should Read” lists that I keep in the right-hand cubby of my desk. Yet, here I am, just reading him for the first time. Okay, so maybe that’s not quite accurate. I think I read “The Eye of the Raven,” a selection from Desert Notes, in some anthology along the way of life, and it was really striking.

Thus, when I came across his book About This Life in some stack in my house, I put it in my teaching bag and began reading it in those few moments between things. I’m a little sad I didn’t read him much before this. There’s just something honest, soft, strong, and smooth about his writing. It’s almost as if his words are like pieces of obsidian - beautiful and cool and safe until you hit that sharp edge.

Perhaps the essay that has most stuck with me is “Apologia.” On a cross country drive, Lopez stops each time he finds an animal killed on the side of the road, and he moves it away - buries it if he can - but gives it dignity that it doesn’t have it its mangled abandonment on the shoulder. The essay begins this way:

A few miles east of home in the Cascades I alow down and pull over for two raccoons, sprawled still as stones in the road. I carry them to the side and lay them in sunshot, windblown grass in the barrow pit. In eastern Oregon, along U.S. 20, black-tailed jackrabbits lie like welts of sod - three, four, then a faith. By the bridge over Jordan Creek, just shy of the Idaho border in the drainage of the Owyhee River, a crumpled adolescent porcupine leers up almost maniacally over its blood-flecked teeth. I carry each one away from the pavement into a cover of grass or brush out of decency, I think. And worry. Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?”

I am struck by the simple action of this story - who but the most compassionate of men would actually stop to move roadkill out of the road? But I am also moved by the great and powerful metaphorical value of this idea that our journeys fall apart sometimes - whether we be animal or human (as if that’s a precise distinction) - and often, we are left lying on the side of the road leering maniacally. Sometimes, perhaps, we need a compassionate hand to move us aside out of the light of life so that we can gain some dignity.

Lopez’s writing brings me into a quiet place where I can contemplate - almost like I’m sitting in a copse of trees listening to the breeze. If you’re looking for that quiet, pick up About a Life and read. ...more

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Oct 11, 2018 Heidi Burkhart rated it it was amazing

I read this absolutely ages and ages ago! Lopez gets even better with time. A wonderful book for thoughtful and reflective readers.

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Feb 21, 2021 Amanda rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: photography, autobiography-memoir, nonfiction, nature-wildlife, writers, essays-short-stories, environment-conservation, geography-travel, aviation, oceans-marine-life

About This Life, a collection of essays and written work from the late Barry Lopez.
Some pieces resonated deeply with me, some stirred me, some fascinated me, a few - I didn't care much for. That's the way it goes with collective works.
Lopez was a gifted writer. I'm glad I invested the time in reading this.

My favorites: A Voice (introduction)
The American Geographies and Learning to See, which felt connected and stirred me the most.

"To really come to an understanding of a specific American geog ...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Rick rated it it was ok

Shelves: essays

This is my introduction to Barry Lopez and it was a less engaging one than I hoped it would be. The essays are personal, at times too personal, not in the sense that they are intimate but in that they present a take that left this reader wondering, “Really? You did that, huh?” On a long country road trek across the country you stopped to be respectful of any and all roadkill be it a deer, raccoon, cat, squirrel, crow, rodent. Each time you pulled off the road to provide an ecological burial? Tha ...more

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Dec 17, 2018 Jerry Pogan rated it it was amazing

I became a big fan of Barry Lopez decades ago after reading "Arctic Dreams". He reminds me a great deal of Peter Matthiessen who also writes great fiction and non-fiction. This is a collection of essays that combine his personal life and naturalist life. I especially enjoyed the book because I was able to connect some parts of my own life with some of his essays. First off, I read much of this book on a flight from Boise via Portland to Austin Texas and the book includes an essay about his exper ...more

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Apr 24, 2009 Isaac rated it it was amazing

This book. This book is an unburied treasure, a masterpiece adding new words to my lexicon and new thoughts to my cerebrum sentence by sentence. Barry Lopez is an incredible individual, and this compilation of travel writing and personal reflections shows his character with a clarity that I have very rarely come across. I read with a mix of envy awe and joy at his vast knowledge of the natural world along with technology and human history.

A month plummeting around the world on 747 cargo plane ...more

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Sep 17, 2008 Claudia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: environment, writing

You may know Barry Lopez from books such as "Arctic Dreams," "Of Wolves and Men," "Field Notes," or "Crossing Open Ground."

All of them pale when comparing them to the incredible collection of writing and essays found in "About This Life."

Rather than solely describing nature as potential for conquest, Lopez steps back and gazes on the relationship between human nature and non-human nature, mulling time and place, and asking: What does it mean to be who we are, where we are?

His writing is some of ...more

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Aug 05, 2011 Caitlin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

“Being on time is like being on fire.”
These essays accomplish what I think Terry Tempest Williams set out to do – describe the relationship between man and nature, as well as celebrate observation and experience of the natural world - but do it so much better. Lopez has a remarkable talent for incredibly precise, minute descriptions of the sensory and psychological experiences of and reactions to nature. He really makes the reader slow down, evoking memories and drawing so much meaning out of t ...more

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May 04, 2013 Richard rated it it was amazing

Shelves: stranger-than-fiction

I absolutely loved this book. It is old enough that it may be hard to get but I have chosen it to be the featured read for The Stranger Than Fiction Book Group for Sept. My hero Kaite Stover has managed to find 9 copies. This book of essays about all matter of things is worth reading if all you read is the essay discribing the author's hands. If you work with your hands or love someone who does this may bring tears to your eyes. It did mine. This was a National Book Award winner and Lopez has al ...more

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Mar 15, 2021 Kyle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, international, personal, animals

Barry Lopez, who died recently and had a Fresh Air obit I heard, was a prolific travel writer. His About This Life (a semi-autobiographical collection of shorter pieces) is the kind of heady nonfiction that seems flat at best but is actually quite deep. Simplistic on the surface, but soon pretty marvelous. Not informational travel purely (though the Bonaire or Hokkaido essays or the ones about North American animals do have a lot of information in them), but it's experiential travel, like memori Barry Lopez, who died recently and had a Fresh Air obit I heard, was a prolific travel writer. His About This Life (a semi-autobiographical collection of shorter pieces) is the kind of heady nonfiction that seems flat at best but is actually quite deep. Simplistic on the surface, but soon pretty marvelous. Not informational travel purely (though the Bonaire or Hokkaido essays or the ones about North American animals do have a lot of information in them), but it's experiential travel, like memories, like impressions… "The odor and the flowers’ colors in the garden attracted me", so he'd want visits there, for instance to re-gather alphabet blocks he'd purposely pushed out his window the day before (21).

Lopez "understood that my Jesuit education, my social and economic class, my good grades, my trained and confident young man’s voice, my white skin, and the hegemony of my religion all pointed toward being well received in the world" (28). In a reading he skipped class sophomore year to attend, an Odyssey translation, he crystallized an attitude toward language and story: "galvanized in beauty by [the] presentation. History, quest, longing" (29).

"'Did you see the octopus!' someone shouted after a dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was there, just then? Why?" (54). A part to roll your eyes at a little, but it soon develops into truer, more interesting expression. He would lie awake "trying to remember some moment of the day just past. The very process of calling upon the details of color and sound was a reminder of how provocative the landscape is, to both the senses and the intellect" (85).

In Hokkaido, "Nowhere here is 'scale-of-human-enterprise' large. It meshes easily with the land" (72); and in a Galápagos spot "You extend your fingers here to the damp, soft rims of orchids, blooming white on the flanks of dark volcanoes" (79). A few facts ensue, like "The cleft fore-edge of a lowland tortoise’s carapace resembles the sharply rising pommel of a sixteenth-century Spanish saddle, the old Spanish for which was galopego" (87); and a lot of opinions/reasoning ensue, like "Our knowledge of life is slim. The undisturbed landscapes are rapidly dwindling. And no plan has yet emerged for a kind of wealth that will satisfy all people" (91). I beg to differ, though, sort of -- a Green New Deal might redefine and re-orient us toward what's healthier.

With lush synonyms for days, Lopez can describe in precise detail things others might say were 'big', 'loud', 'good'. It rarely if ever seems needlessly verbose, or like he's putting ornaments on something hollow. It's all fascinating. Like in "Flight", when he contemplates time itself (142) or the goods we push hither and yon (146). There's a bit of shame later at the stereotypes we've all helped cultivate: "animals are all beautiful, diligent, one might even say well behaved" (176). But soon, "The shock to the senses comes from a different shape to the silence, a difference in the very quality of light, in the weight of the air" (177).

He mourns too: "An incipient industry, capitalizing on the nostalgia Americans feel for the imagined virgin landscapes of their ancestors, and on a desire for adventure, now offers people a convenient though sometimes incomplete or even spurious geography as an inducement to purchase a unique experience" (183). There can be manipulation of this nostalgia if there's political will and people are removed from where they could find firsthand disagreement, though (185).

A rare, tiny misstep might be when Lopez bumbles around a poetic look at an anagama kiln, where I thought he tried too hard. I appreciate the secular spirituality, I do, but here it's ladled on too quickly, and the essay has a bit of a gawky, unpolished veneer overall. But soon after he returns to better things, including a profound and many-faceted Moby-Dick metaphor. As well as the power of physical hands for instance: "not hard to believe they remember the heads patted, the hands shaken, the apples peeled, the hair braided, the wood split, the gears shifted, the flesh gripped and stroked" (288).

From the very practical he misinterpreted while young -- like, financial rules, check writing ("You write in whatever you want… You can even, I said, write in a hundred dollars. More, a thousand, and go to the bank. They give it to you" (314)) -- to the very notional, the very abstract -- like, identifying with artifacts ("Just speculation [about] what they believe happened here [or similarly] about what we did" (343)), Lopez runs the gamut in some of the final essays in this book. Crisp vignettes usually enough.

Always a cute blend of astute memorization and fastidious note-taking, it must take, to jog through experiential nonfiction like this; as true, I imagine, for both a long-ago memory or an expedition hours ago! All to the reader's taste, it can seem mostly, how plain and utilitarian the prose is (all except little hints of poetry, of course), but far from just any old writer doing certain things it's unmistakably 'Barry Lopez doing certain things'. Even the boring, uniform 'doing' holds so much special.

There's a personal hope in photographs he says he has "perhaps because I presume we share certain principles related to the effort to imagine or explain" (310). Plus, earlier, he'd written that prose is far from just information conveyance, though: it's more to "help her discover what she means" (33). ...more

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Jun 23, 2019 Kate Mcphail rated it it was amazing

4.5 stars
A breath of fresh air

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Aug 19, 2019 Sean rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This man has a beautiful mind.

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Feb 12, 2021 Jeff Garrison rated it it was amazing

Shelves: adventure, environmental-studies, creative-non-fiction, essays, nature, memoir

This is a wonderful collection of essays. I listened to an abridged edition as well as read the essays. The Audible version of the book was wonderful because the late Lopez read his work.

The collection (in the book and on audible) begins with a memoir essay titled “A Voice.” In this wonderful piece, Barry tells the story of his young life, from his early years in New York, to moving and living much of his school years in California, and then back to New York for a few years before he headed off This is a wonderful collection of essays. I listened to an abridged edition as well as read the essays. The Audible version of the book was wonderful because the late Lopez read his work.

The collection (in the book and on audible) begins with a memoir essay titled “A Voice.” In this wonderful piece, Barry tells the story of his young life, from his early years in New York, to moving and living much of his school years in California, and then back to New York for a few years before he headed off to Notre Dame. During this time, Barry experienced the world (often through his mother’s husbands and boyfriends). He even gets a first-hand view (although a somewhat skewed view) of what the writing life is about as he meets John Steinbeck at a summer camp. Steinbeck’s boys were at the same camp. I came away with the appreciation that Lopez never lost his childhood curiosity and these early experiences helped him develop a voice that has made him a beloved storyteller. This is the second book I’ve read of Lopez. Many years ago, I read River Notes.

One of the unifying themes running through these essays is the journey. While many of the essays highlight travels to faraway places (Hokkaido, the Arctic, Antarctica, Galapagos), others focus on the journey itself. In “Flight,” he jets around as a passenger on air freight planes while collecting information for a story. One day in Asia, the next Europe or South Africa, and then he’s back in the States. The whirlwind of travel informs the reader about modern commerce, but we also see how Lopez was intensely interested in everything, from walking the streets of Seoul in the early morning hours to learning from the pilots.

The essay “Apologia,” focuses on bits of travel around the United States as he stops to remove dead animals from the highway. This is not just a good deed as he has interest in each of the animals.

In “Speed,” he drives his brother’s Corvette from Chicago to the Amish Country of Northern Indiana, taking a friend who is scouting out locations to film a documentary. But the shooting location is a side-story. The main story centers on driving this muscle car on rural backroads. I found it intriguing that one known as an environmental writer would enjoy speeding in a Corvette, but then remembered stories of Edward Abbey tossing beer cans out of the window of this truck.

The essay, “Murder” finds Lopez driving from Sante Fe to a summer job in Wyoming. In Moab, Utah, he meets a woman who asks him to kill her husband. He quickly flees, racing through the sagebrush of the America West.

Another common theme in these stories are the skills displayed by others. Whether it is the building and flying of airplanes in “Flight,” or the firing of pottery in a dragon kiln in “Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire,” or the gracious naturalist author in Hokkaido, Lopez appreciates talent. He also is constantly aware of his natural setting, whether it’s hearing the occasional “staccato cry of a pileated woodpecker” or the change in the air in the summer of ’76 in New York. As the nation celebrated the bicentennial, his mother was dying. Lopez always catches the details.

“The American Geographies” was my favorite essay in the collection. Part incitement of our lack of knowledge of geographies, Lopez acknowledges the “local nature” of geography. Few people have the time or opportunity to full appreciate the diversity of America’s landscape. He invites us to be more intimate with our surroundings, knowing the geology and the natural world from firsthand experience.

Now I want to pull off River Notes and reread it along with another book by Lopez.
...more

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Dec 20, 2020 Lindseyb rated it it was amazing

This book holds enough ideas and connections to fill a lifetime of thought. Barry Lopez is incredible. I had read some of these same essays in a different compilation over a decade ago, and it was kind of amazing to notice how much of the imagery stuck with me and simmered and developed over the years, and how it paved the way for my literary interests in the German tradition and my dissertation work.

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Jun 26, 2021 Susan rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

A few years ago I was volunteering at the Berkeley Book Festival, giving out wristbands and tickets in front of one of the large venues. Barry Lopez was speaking and the Berkeley crowd seemed jazzed. I had never heard of him and came across this recently. Wow. The quality of his noticing is intense. It makes me want to go all around noticing and describing things too.

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Mar 08, 2021 Valerie Vlasenko rated it it was amazing

Beautiful meditative read. This was my first but definitely not the last book by the author. It did create distinct images of scenes, landscapes and characters described in the book.

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Aug 24, 2012 George Seaton rated it it was amazing

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. A cherished book, "Of Wolves and Men," led me to search for other titles by Lopez. Forgive me if I reveal my utter ignorance here, but little did I know how prolific this fellow is. I chose, "This Life..." because the blurb piqued my interest, and I was not disappointed.

This is a beautiful work, tinged throughout with marvelous literary prose, poetry really. Though I did find the traipse from one chapter to another a little awkward--there is really no sensible flow here--I cannot find fault with ...more

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Feb 13, 2021 Cindy Ann rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nature, nat-lit-book-club

As a collection of essays, I didn't feel they were cohesive. The only thing they had in common, at times, were their author.

I enjoyed the words very much, though. My favorite essay, Effluerage: The Stoke of Fire, is a beautiful description of an anagama kiln and the artist community that attends it.

His patience and mastery with words and his intensity of observation were evident throughout the essays. I will attempt to read some of his other work.
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Sep 26, 2010 Steve Duong rated it did not like it

Shelves: big-picture-301

I consider anyone who reads this to have patience like a temple. I could not for the life of me sit down and read this book. Every single page was a triumph in not loosing consciousness. I have never read a book so boring before in my life. Don't get me wrong, I love Barry Lopez, I've read a few of his books (mainly compilations of essays and poems) but this.. this was just not something I could stomach. Look, Barry Lopez is a traveler. You can either find him 2000 ft in the air or roaming a int ...more

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May 30, 2017 Steven rated it it was amazing

This was my first introduction to Barry Lopez. After asking a local bookseller for a recommendation based on my interest in nature, this book of essays and shorts was passed my way.

Lopez has a writing style that helped me realize how little I've bothered to take a look at so many natural phenomena. His perception of light and color have a pallet much more expansive and descriptive than my own. Yet through his descriptions I find I can occasionally expand my own capacity of visualization.

These st ...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Alexia rated it it was ok

"I came to value exceedingly novels and essays and works of nonfiction that connected human enterprise to real and specific places, and I grew to be mildly distrustful of work that occured in no particular place, work so cerebral and detached as to be refutable only in an argument of ideas."

I struggled with how many stars to give this book. This is the first book I've read, haven't liked, but respected. I think it comes down to the quote I copied above. As readers we value very different things ...more

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Mar 13, 2018 Lynda rated it really liked it

I enjoy reading Barry Lopez. Many chapters of this book were very engaging. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading about his experience traveling on container planes delivering unbelievable "products" around the world. I would never have thought I would enjoy that and I learned so much. There were a few chapters that did not hold my interest, but I will definitely read more of his books! ...more

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Aug 29, 2020 Brian Griffith rated it liked it

Shelves: lit, ecology, animals

This book is good for fans of Lopez, who want to know more about him personally. I found it an eclectic collection of writing, some on journeys to places, some on appreciating crafts, some on Lopez's adventures in fast cars as a young man. I appreciated the travel writing, especially about the islands of Bonaire, Hokkaido, and the Galapagos archipelago. ...more

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Jan 15, 2015 Chelsea added it

I usually love Barry Lopez, but this collection didn't click for me. I didn't like that the essays were all in different exotic places, and that the ones I read weren't that long. It began to feel like globe-hopping without any connecting thread. This might be a good book to read after reading all the other Barry Lopez essays, with this one as desert. ...more

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About Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez

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Barry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.

Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics an ...more

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Quotes from About This Life

“Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.” — 21 likes

“For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.” — 18 likes

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