In this epic travelogue, nature writer Barry Lopez's slow but steady observations of a magnificent but damaged planet mirror the slow but steady exploitation of its resources and the extent of human suffering such a feat requires. Horizon is a book with no central horizon, and for that we should be grateful. You could ask for no better travel guide as long as you are open to the possibilities of tangential paths and his 'capacity for wonder' ... Lopez is a thoughtful and careful curator, sweeping the planet to understand not only its topography but also the cultural geography of humans and the relationship between the two.
Of course, deftly sketched landscapes are one of [Lopez's] chief delights — and Horizon, suspended halfway between travelogue and memoir, offers plenty of them ... [The book] makes for dreamlike reading, and these are clearly locations and memories meant to be savored. With his signature style, [Lopez] filters the landscapes through cultural contexts, political history, and sharp physical observation. And he asks questions — explicitly, but also implicitly ... Occasionally, it's difficult going — not just because of the import of these questions, but because Lopez doesn't shy away from himself in his telling, the sort of flawed humanity that makes one think about one's own filters for geographies of all kinds ... But Lopez is a welcoming host as he brings you across the world. He's especially at home in the cold, and the chapters in the Arctic and Antarctica are full of passages that, in their painstaking physicality, lead inevitably to deeper psychological places ... Horizon is a biography and a portrait of some of the world's most delicate places, but at heart it's a contemplation of Lopez's belief that the only way forward is compassionately, and together.
Horizon is beautiful and brutal, uplifting and bleak, a story of the universal human condition set in some of the most distinctive places on earth ... Strangely, though, these relentless reminders of egregious acts don’t diminish the appeal of seeing the world through Lopez’s eyes. His reverence for exploring every corner of the world, even the sites of its most shameful histories, is infectious.
[Lopez's] most encompassing, autobiographical, passionately detailed, and reflective book ... Prodigiously attentive out in the world and rigorous on the page, morally inquisitive and bracingly candid, Lopez pegs this expansive narrative to places that have special resonance for him ... Sharply attuned to the wonders and decimation of the living world, the endless assaults against indigenous people, and the daunting challenges of a changing climate, Lopez tells revelatory tales, poses tough questions, and shares wisdom, all while looking to the horizon.
Known as a nature writer and conservationist, Mr. Lopez writes with equal enthusiasm about human origins, the search for the edge of the expanding universe, classical music, arctic archaeology, Impressionist painting and Aboriginal rock art. There is no discernible limit to his curiosity: If a kitchen sink caught his eye, he might throw that into the mix, too. His new book, intended as a career-capping summa, is a capacious blend of popular science, travel writing and autobiography, which never (well, hardly ever) feels miscellaneous ... Mr. Lopez treats these locations as base camps and frequently wanders off the trail, making graceful leaps in time and geography to follow his intellectual fancies ... Mr. Lopez is at his best writing about natural history, where his scrupulous research and talent for lucid exposition make the sometimes tedious business of scientific fieldwork come alive ... At a first reading, the reader may scoff at the author’s excessive sensitivity, getting into a panic about offending ghosts... But as his beautifully composed book progresses, and its steady intellectual rigor makes itself felt, one looks back on the passage with respect and even affection ... Like many learned writers, [Lopez] doesn’t exult in his erudition but rather laments what he doesn’t know. How much more we have to gain from an intellect that does not want to instruct us but rather invites us to join in the adventure of learning.
Now in his 70s, Lopez writes with fervid wonder and fascination about all he’s seen and experienced ... Horizon amplifies these warnings [about the need to work together to save the environmentt] to an almost deafening level and makes any travel writing that doesn’t share Lopez’s sense of responsibility and purpose seem derelict by comparison ... It’s thrilling to read about Lopez watching through the window of a locomotive ... And Lopez’s descriptions of hiking through the middle of a polar desert in the Arctic are invigorating ... It requires a certain degree of ego and fortune to be able to share stories about flying a kite at the South Pole, diving the Great Barrier Reef, and dodging venomous mambas in Kenya. Lopez recognizes this, but he also heeds the demand for humility inherent in such adventures.
The best parts of Horizon are like a carefully constructed mosaic ... you hardly know what you’ll be reading about from page to page ... Lopez packs his pages like the hold of a cargo plane, with everything strapped down, aisles between, and labelled. The argument is sometimes fleeting, and Horizon is a less focused book than Arctic Dreams, but it has a definite design—like that of a garden ... The book’s style acts out its therapeutic aim: a battle against despair ... Horizon is full of small miscommunications, unasked questions, odd tensions between Lopez and his scientific colleagues ... In every section something unnerves him[.]
Reading Barry Lopez is a religious experience, and that’s not meant entirely as a compliment ... Lopez is a scientist, a geologist, an archaeologist, a photographer; he’s a polymath whose interest ranges widely but always returns to the landscape. It’s striking, though, that it’s the final chapter, about Antarctica, that is the most memorable and compelling. There’s a sense of relief when Lopez steps away from it all, into the blinding whiteness of the ice ... 'One can never,' [Lopez] writes, 'even by paying the strictest attention at multiple levels, entirely comprehend a single place, no matter how many times one might travel there. This is not only because the place itself is constantly changing but because the deep nature of every place is not transparency. It’s obscurity.' The same might be said of the author of this strangely tight-lipped memoir.
[Lopez's] prose is beautiful, but what makes his nonfiction books... so memorable is the sweeping reach of his mind. He makes connections you might never have thought of before, yet they seem inevitable the instant you read them ... Horizon is an epic journey for readers, 512 pages of text dense with natural and human history, adventure tales and miniature biographies, science of all kinds — biology, geology, anthropology and more — as well as personal memoir. It’s a book to read slowly and contemplatively despite the urgency of its mission.
The early chapters of Horizon are dense with intention, with something more than a writer’s ordinary desire to explain where he’s going and how he plans to get there ... a kind of personal anthology arranged as nonsequential autobiography, an interrogative autobiography. The writer’s recurring statements of purpose serve almost as a guide to the book’s fragmentary, sometimes oblique structure ... Lopez brings these enormous questions down to earth by rooting them in a series of landscapes. In a sense, Lopez is remapping the world, revisiting places of surprising starkness and beauty ... There’s an extraordinary delicacy in what Lopez does—the way he relates to traditional, indigenous wisdom and the people who sustain it within their own lives.
Lopez's free-associative essays blend vivid reportage on landscapes, wildlife, and the knotty relationships among the scientists he accompanies with larger musings on natural history, environmental and climate crises, and the sins of Western imperialism in erasing indigenous cultures. It’s often hard to tell where Lopez is going with his frequent digressions: one two-page section skitters from global cancer rates past a one-eyed goshawk he once saw in Namibia to an astrophysics experiment at the South Pole to detect dark matter, with no particular conclusion. Still, his prose is so evocative and his curiosity so infectious that readers will be captivated.
