Cantitate/Preț
Produs
Total produse
Vezi coșul
Common Ground: Encounters with Nature at the Edges of Life de Rob Cowen

Common Ground: Encounters with Nature at the Edges of Life

Autor Rob Cowen
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 2 noi 2016

Considerăm că sursa cea mai profundă a acestui volum nu este doar observația empirică, ci o cartografiere intimă a stărilor de spirit, extrasă din însemnările de teren și trăirile personale ale autorului după mutarea sa din Londra în nordul Angliei. Common Ground nu este un tratat de botanică, ci o mărturie despre cum un petic de pământ neglijat de capitalism, un „teren viran” în formă de inimă, poate deveni oglinda unei întregi existențe. Notăm cu interes cum Rob Cowen refuză să vadă natura ca pe ceva exterior; pentru el, buruienile și hățișurile de la marginea orașului sunt prelungiri ale propriei identități.

Structura cărții, marcată de capitole precum „DNA” sau „Metamorphoses”, indică o progresie care nu este doar sezonieră, ci profund biologică și umană. În timp ce autorul explorează straturile de viață animală din acest spațiu intermediar, el procesează vestea propriei paternități, transformând experiența lecturii într-o meditație despre continuitate. Cine a apreciat portretul naturii urbane din A Natural History of Empty Lots de Christopher Brown va găsi aici aceeași profunzime biografică, aplicată însă unui context mult mai personal și poetic. Dacă în Skimming Stones autorul se concentra pe abilități practice de conectare cu mediul, în Common Ground el atinge o maturitate stilistică ce amintește de The Stubborn Light of Things de Melissa Harrison, unde tranziția de la urban la rural devine un catalizator pentru redescoperirea sinelui. Stilul este unul evocator, aproape romanesc, reușind să confere unei zone marginale o aură magică și misterioasă.

Citește tot Restrânge

Preț: 23611 lei

Puncte Express: 354

Carte indisponibilă temporar


Wish list
Gift list
Am citit!
Adaugă în listă
Doresc să fiu notificat când acest titlu va fi disponibil:
Trimite

Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780226424262
ISBN-10: 022642426X
Pagini: 352
Ilustrații: 8 halftones
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.51 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte oricui simte că viața modernă l-a deconectat de ritmurile naturale. Common Ground oferă cititorului o perspectivă unică: aceea că nu trebuie să călătorești în sălbăticii îndepărtate pentru a găsi miracolul vieții. Este o lectură despre transformare, despre responsabilitatea de a deveni părinte și despre frumusețea stranie a locurilor de la marginea civilizației, câștigând o nouă înțelegere a conceptului de „acasă”.

Despre autor

Rob Cowen este un scriitor britanic premiat, recunoscut ca una dintre cele mai captivante voci contemporane în literatura dedicată naturii. După succesul volumului Common Ground, el și-a continuat explorarea relației dintre om și mediul înconjurător în lucrarea The Heeding, scrisă în contextul pandemiei globale. Opera sa, care include și volumul Aller Land, se distinge prin capacitatea de a îmbina istoria naturală cu reflecția personală, fiind adesea comparat cu marii maeștri ai genului pentru modul în care reușește să găsească semnificații profunde în peisajele cotidiene.

Descriere scurtă

All too often, we think of nature as something distinct from ourselves, something to go and see, a place that’s separate from the ordinary modern world in which we live and work. But if we take the time to look, we soon find that’s not how nature works. Even in our parceled-out, paved-over urban environs, nature is all around us; it is in us. It is us.
 
That’s what Rob Cowen discovered after moving to a new home in northern England. After ten years in London he was suddenly adrift, searching for a sense of connection. He found himself drawn to a square-mile patch of waste ground at the edge of town. Scrappy, weed-filled, this heart-shaped tangle of land was the very definition of overlooked—a thoroughly in-between place that capitalism no longer had any use for, leaving nature to take its course. Wandering its meadows, woods, hedges, and fields, Cowen found it was also a magical, mysterious place, haunted and haunting, abandoned but wildly alive—and he fell in fascinated love.
 
Common Ground is a true account of that place and Cowen’s transformative journey through its layers and lives, but it’s much more too. As the land’s stories intertwine with events in his own life—and he learns he is to become a father for the first time—the divisions between human and nature begin to blur and shift. The place turns out to be a mirror, revealing what we are, what we’re not and how those two things are ultimately inseparable.
 
This is a book about discovering a new world, a forgotten world on the fringes of our daily lives, and the richness that comes from uncovering the stories and lives—animal and human—contained within. It is an unforgettable piece of nature writing, part of a brilliant tradition that stretches from Gilbert White to Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald.
 
“I am dreaming of the edge-land again,” Cowen writes. Read Common Ground, and you, too, will be dreaming of the spaces in between, and what—including us—thrives there.
 

Notă biografică

Rob Cowen is an award-winning journalist and writer whom the Guardian called, “one of the UK’s most exciting nature writers.” He has written regular columns on nature and travel for the Independent, Independent on Sunday and the Telegraph, and he is the author of Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild. He lives and writes in Yorkshire in the north of England.
 

Cuprins

Map of the Edge-land
Preface to the US Edition


Prologue: New Year’s Eve

Crossing Point

Ultrasound

The Union of Opposites

DNA

One Day

The Turning Time

Metamorphoses

Last Orders

Revelations

Epilogue: The Notebook


Acknowledgements
Notes and Selected Bibliography

Recenzii

A Guardian readers’ Top Ten Book of the Year
 

"In beautifully written and evocative prose, English nature writer Cowen explores the relationship between humans and nature, making it abundantly clear that nature is where you find it.   His subject is ostensibly a single square mile of waste land on the edge of Bilton, a small town in northern England. . . . He masterfully describes this place of beauty and garbage, a place filled with wildlife and the smells and sounds of the encroaching town. But he does much more than superbly describe the transformation of the seasons over the course of a single year. In discussing the changes the land and its inhabitants have experienced over hundreds of generations, Cowen brings the lives of individuals into sharp and poignant focus. . . . He captivatingly blends science, politics, and poetry. . . . Cowen shows how to find joy and awe in the quotidian while cogitating on the world we will leave the next generation."
 

"Bold and beautiful."

"A poetic examination of humankind's relationship with nature. . . . Recommended for the dedicated nature enthusiast and those interested in environmentalism."

"Thanks to Rob Cowen’s remarkable book Common Ground, I’ve learned that there's a word for my woods: edgelands. A British nature writer, Cowen celebrates not remote slices of paradise but the wild places accessible to all of us: the unregulated land at the edges of human habitation where nature has been left to its own devices. Or, as Cowen puts it, 'the inglorious fallow patches you find at the fringes of the everyday.' . . . Cowen brings reverent attention to an edgeland near his home in the north of England.

"Sensitive, thoughtful, and poetic. Rob Cowen rakes over a scrap of land with forensic care, leading us into a whole new way of looking at the world."

"A cracking book, and having finished, I now feel deprived."
 

"One of the most original books in any genre."
 

"Touched by genius."
 

"Highly poetic. . . .  Common Ground is about the transformative power of this unnoticed piece of land, if one can only stand and stare for long enough."

"Strange, complicated, deeply original and ultimately satisfying. . . . Swings from realism into remarkable histories, human and animal. All our relationships with nature are fed by the imaginative as well as the scientific parts of the mind and in Common Ground, Cowen has found a new way of opening out this aspect."
 

"Wild and unusual. An author coming into his real story, leaping over the space between animal and human as though there were no difference between us."

"An eerie, haunting book . . . rendered with hair raising, almost hallucinogenic, lyricism. . . . Cowen moves on through the seasons of the year and the creatures of the edge land, feeling, more than observing, how the improving circumstances of animal life mirror his own climb out of darkness."
 

"Heartfelt, deep, beautiful, and moving."

"Luminous. . . . A breath of fresh air."
 

"Blending natural history with a novelistic approach, Cowen revives his connection to the evocative, mysterious power to the natural world."