Landscape and Memory

A Time Magazine Best Books of the Year. In Landscape and Memory, award-winning author Simon 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 gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art, as encyclopedic as The Golden Bough and as irresistibly readable as Schama's own Citizens . "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."-- New York Times "Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."-- New York Review of Books

A Time Magazine Best Books of the Year. In Landscape and Memory, award-winning author Simon 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 gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art, as encyclopedic as The Golden Bough and as irresistibly readable as Schama's own Citizens . "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."-- New York Times "Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."-- New York Review of Books

The forest primeval, the river of life, the sacred mount – read ‘Landscape and Memory’ to have these explained… ‘Landscape and Memory’ is a history book unlike any other. In a series of journeys through space and time, it examines our relationship with the landscape around us – rivers, mountains, forests – the impact each of them has had on our culture and imaginations, and the way in which we, in turn, have shaped them to answer our needs. This is not a conventional history book, but a book that builds up its argument by a series of poetic stories and impressions which cumulatively have the effect of a great novel. The forest primeval, the river of life, the sacred mount – at the end of this wonderful book we understand where these ideas have come from, why they are so compelling and how they still lie all around us.

The forest primeval, the river of life, the sacred mount – read ‘Landscape and Memory’ to have these explained… ‘Landscape and Memory’ is a history book unlike any other. In a series of journeys through space and time, it examines our relationship with the landscape around us – rivers, mountains, forests – the impact each of them has had on our culture and imaginations, and the way in which we, in turn, have shaped them to answer our needs. This is not a conventional history book, but a book that builds up its argument by a series of poetic stories and impressions which cumulatively have the effect of a great novel. The forest primeval, the river of life, the sacred mount – at the end of this wonderful book we understand where these ideas have come from, why they are so compelling and how they still lie all around us.