The Living Mountain (Canons): A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland: 6

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It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. A keen naturalist and mountaineer, Shepherd is best known for her non-fiction book The Living Mountain (1977; Folio 2021).

The Cairngorms are a mountain range roughly in the middle of Scotland, it is can be a breathtaking beautiful part of the world, but in bad weather can be harsh, unforgiving and unrelenting.With every step upward, disaster comes closer, but neither the tribes nor Anthropoi can or want to head back. I read it, and was changed," he says in his first-rate introduction (I can think of no higher praise than to say it stands up to Shepherd's prose). He has worked as a political analyst and journalist, with a particular focus on the Himalayan region. Strang has exhibited around the UK and abroad, including the Royal Scottish Academy, Gallery One, Berlin and Corte Real Gallery, Portugal.

This contains some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in a long time but is not going to please everyone. Something tells me that Sturgeon’s voice and songs will be with me for a long time, and will take me back to these autumn days in Berlin and Brandenburg, forever linked to this particular time and these particular places. I am a Naturalist (not a Naturist which are the type that run around nude, holding hands and giggling on blankets in the sun), but a Naturalist. A review is supposed to describe what a book is trying to achieve, outline how the author has tried to do so and assess whether they have succeeded. But while reading it, they are – because of the power of the surrounding writing – fleetingly visible.Drawing on different perspectives of the mountain environment, Shepherd makes the familiar strange and the strange awe-inspiring. Shepherd makes the utmost of her senses while walking through the region, often also sleeping outdoors, or experiencing extreme weather phenomena. Written towards the end of World War Two, the manuscript for The Living Mountain was tucked away for almost 30 years before it was published to critical acclaim in 1977. Does the fact that I want to give it an uninspired 3 star mean that I am somehow less than cerebral and lacking depth of thought? Nan Shepherd is best known as the author of the The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse, and A Pass in the Grampians, novels which she wrote from 1928-1933.

In spite of talking about little else than nature, it is far more an interior rumination on the author’s part.

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S. Lewis here which too, explored this idea of animals losing their powers to talk and so on, and trees losing their spirit because of human intervention.

The language is rich, evocative and accurately records the author’s vision and experience, as though we are there too. This is part of the horror of walking in mist on the plateau, for suddenly through a gap one sees solid ground that seems three steps away, but lies in sober fact beyond a 2000 foot chasm. What both works show us is that a powerful part of the global cultural zeitgeist revolves around environmental concerns. For some people, reading so much description might be akin to reading poetry---requiring more attention to the page because there is no plot, little dialogue, and absolutely no suspense.