Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney
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Do you know your "fell field" from your "field pattern"?
Can you distinguish between a "bog," a "fen," a "marsh," a "peatland," and a "swamp"?
Do you desire to know more about "boathook bends" or "oxbow lakes" or "peñas"?
Then Home Ground is the book for you. It provides "the distinctly American vocabulary that people use to characterize the country's landscapes" in an encyclopedic format. Authors such as Jon Krakauer, Luis Alberto Urrea, Barbara Kingsolver, Bill McKibben, Terry Tempest Williams, Elizabeth Cox, and Patricia Hampl provide entries on such landscapes and landscapes features while including historical information, etymological origins, settlement and usage, locations, geological provenance, and the like. These entries are seasoned with quotes from works of literature that include and/or further define some of the terms.
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This is a book for the writer in your life. This is a book for an outdoor enthusiast or amateur geographer. This is a book for someone who loves trivia or pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake.
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You can preview pages of Home Ground HERE.
Soon you'll be impressing your hiking friends as you identify nearby "root wads" or stand in awe at the foot of a "talus slope."
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File under:
*Anthologies
*Landscapes
*Literature
*Reference
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