Sightlines
A Conversation with the Natural World
by Kathleen Jamie
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Pub Date Sep 10 2013 | Archive Date Dec 03 2013
Experiment, The | The Experiment
Description
Winner of the 2014 Orion Book Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the John Burroughs Association 2014 Medal for Distinguished Natural History Book
In Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie reports from the field—from her native Scottish “byways and hills” to the frigid Arctic in fourteen enthralling essays. She dissects whatever her gaze falls upon—vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, orcas rounding a headland, the aurora borealis lighting up the frozen sea. In so doing, she questions what, exactly, constitutes “nature,” and upends the idea that it is always picturesque. Written with precision, subtlety, and wry humor, Sightlines urges the reader: “Keep looking, even when there’s nothing much to see.”
Advance Praise
Praise for the UK edition:
“Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines, a collection of brilliant and enticing essays about natural phenomena, tingles with life. John Berger called her a “sorceress,” and so she is.”
—Diana Athill, author of Somewhere Towards the End
“The dance of Jamie's words enacts the mind in motion as it moves between the shifting, shimmering processes of nature and art.”
—The Guardian
“Jamie’s prose is exquisite, yet never indulgent. . . . This is a book that will stay with you, as its sights and sounds have stayed with its writer. [A] work of intense purity and quiet genius, and we’re lucky to have it.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“A haunting new collection from one of our finest nature writers . . . . Immensely beguiling. There are piquant descriptions that stop you in your tracks . . . . but the real power of the writing derives from the steady increment of detail and the honesty of her responses to the natural world.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“Her written words make readers see with a clarity bestowed by only a few most gifted writers. . . . It is not often that the prose of a poet is as powerful as her verse, but Jamie’s is. There are people uninterested in books about remote places and wild creatures; but to the rest of us [this book] will be a treasure.”
—Literary Review
“There is such a precision, of both thinking and seeing, displayed in these works that you would have to be a very obtuse kind of reader not to realize that Jamie is a poet.”
—The Scotsman
“At which point I put the book down again and thought: ‘I wonder if I would actually kill to be able to write, or think, like that.’ It’s like this pretty much all the way through.”
—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
“Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines, a collection of brilliant and enticing essays about natural phenomena, tingles with life. John Berger called her a “sorceress,” and so she is.”
—Diana Athill, author of Somewhere Towards the End
“The dance of Jamie's words enacts the mind in motion as it moves between the shifting, shimmering processes of nature and art.”
—The Guardian
“Jamie’s prose is exquisite, yet never indulgent. . . . This is a book that will stay with you, as its sights and sounds have stayed with its writer. [A] work of intense purity and quiet genius, and we’re lucky to have it.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“A haunting new collection from one of our finest nature writers . . . . Immensely beguiling. There are piquant descriptions that stop you in your tracks . . . . but the real power of the writing derives from the steady increment of detail and the honesty of her responses to the natural world.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“Her written words make readers see with a clarity bestowed by only a few most gifted writers. . . . It is not often that the prose of a poet is as powerful as her verse, but Jamie’s is. There are people uninterested in books about remote places and wild creatures; but to the rest of us [this book] will be a treasure.”
—Literary Review
“There is such a precision, of both thinking and seeing, displayed in these works that you would have to be a very obtuse kind of reader not to realize that Jamie is a poet.”
—The Scotsman
“At which point I put the book down again and thought: ‘I wonder if I would actually kill to be able to write, or think, like that.’ It’s like this pretty much all the way through.”
—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781615190836 |
| PRICE | $14.95 (USD) |
