Terra Antarctica: looking into the emptiest continent, by William L. Fox, arrived in the post today.
“An enthralling guided tour of the human mind’s attempt to make space into place and land into landscape.” – Nature
“How the human mind transforms space into place, or land into landscape, is the line of inquiry that I have been following through several books. The process is most easily traced when watching the mind at work in large, unfamiliar, and relatively empty environments, where we often have difficulty understanding our personal scale in space and time, versus the temperate forests and savanna where we primarily evolved as a species, or in the cities that we have constructed to fit our needs. Deserts are among the emptiest spaces on land encountered by humans, and the Antarctic is the largest and most extreme desert on Earth. (Preface, xiii)”