... engrossing ... With his unique blend of wide-eyed curiosity, meticulous research, and erudite analysis, Winchester weaves a tapestry that encompasses nearly every element involved in the concept of 'land' ... Land abounds with dozens of eye-opening factoids to please any fan of popular history ... But this is no mere bathroom book packed with intriguing facts. His storytelling talents on full display, Winchester convincingly demonstrates that, as the subtitle notes, land and ownership have indeed 'shaped the modern world.' Those kinds of sweeping pronouncements are an unfortunately bombastic, exaggerated element of countless nonfiction subtitles but, in this case, it holds true ... Though relevant, Winchester’s examination of the disruptive enclosure and clearance movements in rural England and Scotland is probably the book’s least interesting section. However, it’s a rare dull moment in an otherwise entertaining book, exemplified in three standout chapters ... Winchester’s colorfully rendered capsule biographies help to convey the gravity of certain historical milestones ... Winchester is, once again, a consummate guide.
Winchester is good at...adding dashes of drama, narrative, indignation and, above all, connection to disparate historical accounts. He does the same with the brutal dispossession of native populations in North America ... Given the scope of his project, portions of Land are inevitably fleeting—quick visits to multiple regions and countries and conflicts, and a tendency to reduce everything to a dispute over the soil rather than, say, the soul ... Yet there is soul in this book ... Just beneath the surface of Land is a tension between the benevolent stewardship of land for the enjoyment of all...and the compulsion to possess and enclose, to clear and exclude ... a stirring call for communal imperatives, even if its history recounts the constant allure of private ownership.
Winchester is a master at capturing the Old World wonder and romance of exploits like Struve’s ... his prose frequently exudes the comfort and charm of a beloved encyclopedia come to life, centuries and continents abutting through the pages ... Winchester’s nostalgia leads him to skate over the involvement of cartographers, surveyors, and other diligent functionaries in the inner workings of conquest and empire ... In fact, American surveyors in charge of delineating the U.S. border with Mexico were decidedly less apolitical about their task than Winchester proposes ... As Winchester enters the twentieth century, he begins to grapple more directly with the enduring violence wrought by casual imperial boundary-making ... Winchester’s wide-angle view mostly gets the big-picture history right—the narrative arc of expulsion and exploitation—but when he zooms in he is often unable to resist the register of grand adventure ... Even as Winchester dutifully recognizes the 'shameful' and 'repellent' treatment of America’s Indigenous population, he tosses up odd quips and cheeky asides ... Winchester’s account is further undermined by a failure to capture the ongoing nature of many of his chosen histories ... Land vividly depicts the brutal enclosures that took place in Scotland at the beginning of the nineteenth century ... As Winchester gallops back and forth through history, he too often seems content to assemble an eccentric cast of characters without saying much about the systems that have empowered them ... even as he discusses the adoption of coöperative-friendly legislation in places like the Scottish Isles, he criticizes the political unpleasantness that has been necessary to achieve it. On the whole, he seems rather disengaged from the messier, more radical elements of resistance that often precede meaningful change.
... not a polemic, as much as one might sometimes wish it were. Like a lot of journalists-turned-historians, Winchester is a quick study, and there is an astounding amount of information in Land, much of it revealing, although it can also feel somewhat random. As he roams his seemingly boundless terrain, Winchester provides us with set piece after set piece. And yet, despite the epic continents-and-centuries scale he tries to take on, his approach at its best is often miniaturist, as it has been with perhaps greater success in some of his previous books ... most if not all of the people in the book end up becoming symbols, and we can never really grasp how they all interconnect. Personalizing history can sometimes make it more remote, not less ... You can’t help learning a lot from a well-researched book like this, though some of the material may be familiar from other accounts ... despite Winchester’s evident sympathy toward dispossessed Native Americans, which serves as a kind of leitmotif throughout Land, there are too many sentences that could have come out of a high school textbook ... Without a real thesis or overarching theme driving it, Land does not quite come together. It can often be hard to discern why the reader is being told a particular story. Sometimes, though, it is when Winchester is at his least colorful and most reportorial that the connections he is trying to make between the past and the present come through vividly.
This book is meant to be wandering and bird’s-eyed; not a comprehensive treatment but an impressionist view, a history-by-milestone method ... Winchester is at his most entertaining in a chapter on the Polynesian pastime of riding waves on long wooden boards ... Winchester [adds] authority and panache to the narrative ... Winchester has prodigious gifts as a popular historian and an explainer of faraway events. His book is an admirable portrait of what lies beyond the gray sheet off California’s edge, an unquiet realm increasingly at the center of 21st century history.
The intricate vocabulary used to talk about land is one of the many pleasures of Land ... Yet the rich language — whether describing the physical attributes of terrain, or legal rights of ownership and access — also reflects the centrality of land to human societies ... Land also recounts the heroic feats of engineering, with a gripping account of the vast Dutch endeavour to drain the 1.2m acres of the Zuider Zee ... The core of the book, though, is a sobering history of the many acts of dispossession that have led to gross economic inequalities and festering conflicts around the world ... His overarching thesis — overstated but not by much — is that struggles over land, and human hunger to possess it, lie at the root of most human conflicts ... he makes it clear there are no easy answers when it comes to either conservation or land reform ... When it comes to setting out an overarching thesis, the book is perhaps slightly less than the sum of its parts. But it packs in a wealth of ideas and human drama — and gives a fresh view of centuries of social conflict seen through a geographer’s lens.
... informative and thought-provoking ... Land follows the path charted by its predecessors, gracefully blending history, science and an assortment of other disciplines to paint a multifaceted portrait ... Winchester...never misses an opportunity to illuminate his diverse subjects with a vivid anecdote ... One couldn't ask for a more accessible or comprehensive treatment of the subject than Simon Winchester's book.
Weaving together elements of history, geography, geology and science, Winchester paints a raw, in-depth picture of the land that encircles our glorious planet, which is in crisis due to the looming effects of human-induced climate change. He touches on a vast number of topics that have impacted the land since the dawn of civilization, dividing the book into sections that focus on borders, ownership, stewardship, war and restoration ... Ultimately Land is a truthful, revealing exposé, paying tribute to the territory we all share.
... a meticulous study ... Land is steeped in detailed information, it isn’t a quick bedtime read. Rather, it is to be savored, digested, enjoyed over a generous allocation of time. Readers will choose their favorite chapter, each seemingly more compelling than the previous one ... Few authors share Winchester’s ability to explore land’s intrinsic value, move from one sequence to the next so the chapters can be read discretely. Even without the continuity of earlier books like Krakatoa and The Man Who Loved China, this new one is lastingly absorbing.
Land...utterly fails to deliver ... Winchester’s undertaking is undermined from its outset by problems of scope. It’s virtually impossible to discuss land from a global perspective in a single book, however long. In trying to encompass the planet, Winchester inevitably simplifies and universalizes based on European and American settler patterns, and in doing so he undermines even his strongest points ... use of the vanishing Native American trope encapsulates the book’s failure to engage with indigenous knowledge and scholarship ... sentimental commentary on the moral wrongness (but apparent inevitability) of indigenous dispossession and relocation treats colonization as a kind of necessary evil whose aftereffects are largely inconsequential ... Winchester’s assumption that cultures without settled agriculture have no complex relation to the land is both inaccurate and profoundly out of step with the past half century of scholarship and discourse on the subject. His discussion of national borders is equally simplistic and narrow ... Winchester’s book, due to its famous author and high-profile release, is likely to be widely read, and this is genuinely unfortunate, because it adds nothing useful to the discussion and distracts new readers from thoughtful, engaged texts that might allow them to thoughtfully approach questions of land, territory, occupation, and possession.
... a lively curiosity and a lively prose style ... This hopscotching approach has its weaknesses, of course: it tends to produce books that can feel scattershot, more conversational than scholarly (and that can lead to occasional slips, as when he asserts that the borders of the United States have 'little or nothing to do with any physical need for separation,' when in fact most US state borders are drawn along rivers or other physically separating features). But the strengths of the approach are equally obvious: it's no small thing to sit down for a long conversation with a thinker and storyteller like Winchester, to find out what's on his mind this time, and which stories about his new subject have captured his imagination ... [a] charming and challenging book [.]
Winchester, whose rigorously organized mind seems able to codify and categorize any human endeavor into sustained good reading, could easily have hopped from continent to continent, country to country, exploring each region’s land relationships through the perfectly legitimate lenses of history, geology, governance, resources, economies and as many other parameters as made sense. And he does all these things, but not in a predictable textbook fashion.
... a dizzying journey into land ownership, theft, mapping, exploration, conflict, pollution, overdevelopment, and, in the final pages, the increasing land loss now underway due to rising sea levels. Winchester sweeps through history, name drops with abandon, and does his best to make writing about it all look effortless. The problem is not of the size of the subject but his insistence on addressing so much of it ... Expect elegant sentences, intriguing profiles (although sorely lacking in women), and a genial narrator who wanders wherever his curiosity takes him. Be prepared for a very wide-ranging ride.
The latest sweeping, satisfying popular history from the British American author and journalist ... Winchester delivers a riveting history of mapmaking...disheartening accounts of mass acquisitions and theft ... The chapters on the Stalin-ordered mass famine in Ukraine and the shameful World War II imprisonment of Japanese Americans (and confiscation of their property) make for painful reading but important historical reminders ... Engaging revelations about land and property, often discouraging but never dull.
Winchester amasses a wealth of intriguing factoids and arcana, though readers looking for a comprehensive overview of the subject will be disappointed. Still, this is an entertaining and erudite roundup of humanity’s ever-evolving relationship with terra firma.
