Schama, S., 1995, Landscape and Memory, Fontana Press, London
- Author : Schama, S.
- Year : 1995
- Title English : Landscape and Memory
- Publisher : Fontana Press
- Publisher's Location : London
- ISBN : 0-00-686348-5
- Pages : 652
- Comments : Publisher Comments:
One of Time Magazine's Best Books of the Year In Landscape and Memory Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art.
"A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times"Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books Review: "So vast is the undertaking, so broad the canvas, so great the clusters of words and images, so rapid the shifts from scene to scene, so many the characters who appear in the story, so impressionistic and personal the style, that the reader may very well give up the attempt to set the events cited in a useful historical context. Yet as a provocative and erudite commentary on different ways men have of looking at the natural world, and on the transformation of the landscape in the human imagination, there is much to be learned, and many lucious fruits to be gathered from Schama's tree." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review) Review: "Schama has produced an imaginative, provocative, and well-written study of how Western culture has imbued its natural surroundings with history and myth. Focusing on three particular parts of the natural environment, Schama convincingly illustrates how deeply they affect one's consciousness and how that, in turn, has determined what is landscape....His interpretation of Mt. Rushmore as the ultimate symbol of triumph, possession, and imperialism is particularly interesting."M.T. Scholz, Choice