Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an epoch of heat, as well as posing urgent questions informed by years of writing about climate change and the natural world.
What does it feel like to be alive in the Anthropocene?
An account of thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada. It combines place-based writing, memoir and travelogue to offer a witness account of the living in and writing about nature, the wilderness and the environment in the Anthropocene.
Latitudes also explores questions central to creative writing and artistic practice. Through her long experience of reading and teaching fiction and non-fiction, in particular nature writing, McNeil examines the question of the role of writers in an age of dramatic ecological loss. Only by mustering a radical attentiveness to the non-human world, the book argues, will we rediscover our balance, individually and as a civilisation, and gain perspective on the uncanniness of our present era.
Synopsis
From an unparalleled life of extreme encounters with the
natural world, Jean McNeil brings us keen insights on how to respond to a
changing planet. As a young girl in Nova Scotia, her grandmother taught her
to shoot animals for food and she rescued a wolf fallen through ice. Where do
you go from there? Cross Arctic seas, become a professional African safari guide, deliver the guidebook to Costa Rica, lock yourself in an Antarctic research station, write your
heart out. All the while keep listening, for the living world is speaking to
you if you open yourself to hear its voice.
We obsess with human stories. What happens if we shift focus
and bond with the non-human? Read Latitudes and enter the natural world
on its own terms.