Signed Edition
The Savage Landscape
Cal Flyn - Hardback
£20.00
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Cal Flyn Author & Editor
Cal Flyn is an author and journalist from the Highlands of Scotland. Previously she has been a reporter for both The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph, and a contributing editor at The Week magazine. Cal holds a MA in Experimental Psychology from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her first book, ‘Thicker Than Water’, was a Times book of the year and dealt with the colonisation of Australia and questions of inherited guilt.
About The Snow Leopardby Peter Matthiessen :
"This classic work of travel writing takes the form of edited diaries from the author's trek into the Nepali Himalayas in the company of the legendary ecologist George Schaller – they were looking for blue sheep, but the snow leopard came to symbolise a form of enlightenment to the writer, a charismatic but troubled man who studied Zen Buddhism with his late wife, recently lost to cancer. Beautiful, truly sublime."
About The Desert Fathersby Benedicta Ward :
"The Desert Fathers were a loose conglomeration of early Christian ascetics living in the Egyptian deserts. They had no intention of inspiring others – were simply searching for epiphany in the wilderness – but in fact the movement came to influence both eastern and western arms of the Church, including medieval hermits and the Irish missionaries who flung themselves out into the ocean in their coracles. These apopthegmata (sayings) are often cryptic, sometimes strangely comic, and always intriguing."
About The High Seasby Olive Heffernan :
"The ocean is the largest ecosystem on Earth, and certainly the least understood. The legality of its exploitation and protection is also rather complicated. This is a fantastic recent book that really helped me get my head around what is currently at stake – and what it will take to protect marine biodiversity and blue carbon."
About Lone Wolfby Adam Weymouth :
"Adam Weymouth and I have separately grown fascinated by the rebounding populations of carnivores across Europe. I write about wolves and werewolves and woodland in my chapter on the 'crisis of late antiquity' – a time of plagues, economic collapse and large-scale forest regrowth. Adam is more interested in the politics of the present, but it led us both to the Carpathians and conversations with modern-day shepherds and woodsmen."
About A Field Guide To Getting Lostby Rebecca Solnit :
"I could have included almost anything by Rebecca Solnit, who has written extensively on ... well, pretty much everything I'm interested in. Her book River of Shadows, about the photographer Edward Muybridge, was a touchstone when I wrote my chapter on Yellowstone and Ansel Adams. But I choose this lyrical book of meditations on uncertainty because I admire its atmosphere and oblique yet beautiful approach more than anything else of hers that I have read."
About Green Hills of Africaby Ernest Hemingway :
"While researching The Savage Landscape, I shadowed a group of trophy hunters as they stalked cape buffalo in Mozambique's spectacular Niassa Special Reserve, one of the largest protected wildernesses in the world. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, conservation derives much of its funding from hunting – a huge ethical quandary. The hunters I met sought the romance of the big-game safari as portrayed by Hemingway in this literary memoir."
About Landscape and Memoryby Simon Schama :
"My book is two things: a series of thought-provoking adventures in wild places and a cultural history of the idea of wilderness. When we look at nature, we essentially see whatever we expect to see, and the different attitudes to nature in different times and cultures are often so unexpected and interesting to detangle. This book is a modern classic – disentangling environmental history from myth and art history and illuminating it afresh."