What Is Landscape?

By: John R. Stilgoe

Narrated by: David Randall Hunter

In What Is Landscape? John R. Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape's essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children's picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. ("What is that?" "Well, it's not really a slough, not really, it's a bayou...") He offers a highly original, cogent, compact, gracefully written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries. What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills - icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans' misuse of the Latin silvaticus (people of the woods) to coin the word savages; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold.

Discovering landscape is good exercise for body and for mind. This book is an essential guide and companion to that exercise - to understanding, literally and figuratively, what landscape is.

©2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2017 Redwood Audiobooks

What is Landscape? By john stilgoe

Although I enjoyed the content of the book very much the narrator David Randall Hunter was terrible. He read without punctuation and pauses and no intonation or inflection in his voice. A very monotone ramble.