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wtb_michael's review against another edition
5.0
I'd never heard of this before one of my favourite booksellers raved about it to me and it's immediately become one of my absolute favourites.
It tells the story of the author's attempt to follow along with the snow goose migration, from the Gulf of Mexico up to the frozen north of Canada. The nature writing is stunning, glorious - the awe-inspiring sight of tens of thousands of migrating geese is vividly drawn. The landscapes too are incredible, especially as the journey moves further and further north.
But even more stunning are Fiennes' portraits of the odd people he meets on the journey - hunters, train obsessives, birders and more. There are broad themes too about the desire for home, about balancing the excitement of the new against the comforts of the familiar. It's a really wonderful work (and the photo on the front is
It tells the story of the author's attempt to follow along with the snow goose migration, from the Gulf of Mexico up to the frozen north of Canada. The nature writing is stunning, glorious - the awe-inspiring sight of tens of thousands of migrating geese is vividly drawn. The landscapes too are incredible, especially as the journey moves further and further north.
But even more stunning are Fiennes' portraits of the odd people he meets on the journey - hunters, train obsessives, birders and more. There are broad themes too about the desire for home, about balancing the excitement of the new against the comforts of the familiar. It's a really wonderful work (and the photo on the front is
jennifer's review against another edition
5.0
A beautifully written meditation on what home means and one man's journey to define it following a serious illness, told through the lens of a natural history book on the migration of snow geese. Somehow it manages at the same time to be one of the more compelling American road trip memoirs I've read. I love the detours the book takes into the etymology of nostalgia and homesickness. The prose is of a particular variety of precision and care that requires equal care in reading. In lesser hands such care could have been tedious, but Fiennes manages to make it a tool of transcendence.
halfmanhalfbook's review against another edition
4.0
This book was inspired by Fiennes read in of The Snow Goose when younger, and after a period in hospital, when he had a burning longing to return home to familiar and comforting surroundings. He wondered what drove the Snow goose to travel all across America, from Texas to Alaska.
Part travel book and part natural history, Fiennes follows the route that the geese take by coach, meeting a series of characters along the way. At each point that the geese move is determined by the conditions, so occasionally he gets ahead of them, and sees them arrive. In one location he is asked to house sit at one point by someone he has just met and goes out to the place where thy feed and watches them arrive.
It is a beautifully written book, and effortless to read. He successfully manages to link his longing to retuning home with the journey of the snow gooze and them instinctive drive to travel huge distances. Well worth reading.
Part travel book and part natural history, Fiennes follows the route that the geese take by coach, meeting a series of characters along the way. At each point that the geese move is determined by the conditions, so occasionally he gets ahead of them, and sees them arrive. In one location he is asked to house sit at one point by someone he has just met and goes out to the place where thy feed and watches them arrive.
It is a beautifully written book, and effortless to read. He successfully manages to link his longing to retuning home with the journey of the snow gooze and them instinctive drive to travel huge distances. Well worth reading.