Home Ground - by Barry Lopez & Debra Gwartney (Paperback)

About the Book

A landmark work hailed as an homage to landscape and language, now in a redesigned, field guide edition

Book Synopsis

Hailed by book reviewers as a "masterpiece," "gorgeous and fascinating," and "sheer pleasure," Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape was published in fall 2006 in hardcover. It was met with outstanding reviews and strong sales, going into three printings. A language-lover's dream, this visionary reference revitalized a descriptive language for the American landscape by combining geography, literature, and folklore in one volume. This is a totally redesigned, near-pocket-sized field guide edition of the best-selling hardcover.

Home Ground brings together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. The writers draw from careful research and their own distinctive stylistic, personal, and regional diversity to portray in bright, precise prose the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit. Includes an introductory essay by Barry Lopez. At the heart of the book is a community of writers in service to their country, emphasizing a language suggesting the vastness and mystery that lie beyond our everyday words.

Contributors include: Jeffery Renard Allen, Kim Barnes, Conger Beasley, Jr., Franklin Burroughs, Lan Samantha Chang, Michael Collier, Elizabeth Cox, John Daniel, Jan DeBlieu, William deBuys, Gretel Ehrlich, Charles Frazier, Pamela Frierson, Patricia Hampl, Robert Hass, Emily Hiestand, Linda Hogan, Stephen Graham Jones, John Keeble, Barbara Kingsolver, William Kittredge, Jon Krakauer, Gretchen Legler, Arturo Longoria, Bill McKibben, Ellen Meloy, Robert Morgan, Susan Brind Morrow, Antonya Nelson, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, Scott Russell Sanders, Eva Saulitis, Donna Seaman, Carolyn Servid, Kim Stafford, Mary Swander, Arthur Sze, Mike Tidwell, Luis Alberto Urrea, Luis Verano, D. J. Waldie, Joy Williams, Terry Tempest Williams, and Larry Woiwode.

Review Quotes

"Home Ground is a treasure house of a book, chocked with gems of the American vernacular. To learn these terms for features of the landscape is like putting on a new pair of glasses--the land comes more vividly into focus. But to call this a reference work is to shortchange it--the entries are written by some of our best writers, and the result is an unexpected page turner."-- Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma

"Reading hundreds of pages of alphabetized definitions of landscape terms in one sitting may sound as appealing as spending a long hot day in an Arizona malpais--a desert landscape that is, to quote Cormac McCarthy, "all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood"--but it ends up being a lot of fun."-- New York Times

"'Home Ground' . . . is a civilized pleasure, in the way great reference books can be."-- San Francisco Chronicle

"One can almost hear mountains and hills bursting into song, and trees of the field clapping their hands."-- Christian Century

"A group of writers has collected more than 800 fading landscape terms in a new book -- Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. "-- National Public Radio

About the Author

Barry Lopez was an essayist, author, and short-story writer who traveled extensively in both remote and populated parts of the world. He is the author of Arctic Dreams, which received the National Book Award; Horizon, Of Wolves and Men, Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape; and eight works of fiction, including Outside, Light Action in the Caribbean, Field Notes, and Resistance. He is the author of Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects with Julia Martin. His essays are collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. Lopez lived in western Oregon.