As if you haven’t already read enough during the pandemic, I offer my annual pre-holiday roundup of outdoorsy books. This lot also happens to come with the bonus that they might help re-energize sedentary and mouldering brains (looking your way Covidiots, anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, dog-poop-bag-tossers and supporters of Calgary MP Michelle Rempel). Regardless, they’re all well-written, enjoyable reads.
In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration, by Shane O’Mara, 2019, Norton
Of those who might pen a tome to walking—monks, religious pilgrims, through-hikers—you probably wouldn’t have picked a neuroscientist. But such is the case, and, as the subtitle suggests, what we discover about this simple act is far more than we expect. As one reviewer couches it: “a backstage tour of what happens in our brains while we perambulate.”
Shane O’Mara believes regular walking unlocks our cognitive powers like nothing else. But it’s not just him: reams of data support the notion that walking makes us healthier, happier—and smarter. And well it should given that Homo sapiens evolved for, and by, walking. To reverse engineer this trajectory, you have but to watch a toddler’s engagement with the world expand in a fledgling Big Bang after it takes its first steps; the young brain literally re-wires itself before your eyes.
In non-technical prose, O’Mara details how our sensory systems function optimally when moving through the world. In a 2018 study that tracked participants’ activity levels and personality traits over two decades, those who moved least showed the most-malign personality changes. Substantial data also show walkers have lower rates of depression, and that their physical activity has a powerful influence on creative outcomes. With this in mind—pun not intended—O’Mara practices what he preaches, aiming to log an empirically optimal 14,000 steps a day.
This book suffers from only one thing: the paradox of being hard to put down while making you want to ditch it and go for a walk.
Emilio Comici: Angel of the Dolomites, by David Smart, 2020, Rocky Mountain Books
Like his previous book Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss, climbing scribe David Smart brings a long-forgotten titan of climbing lore to startling life in one of the most impressive biographies of an early figure in the sport to be found. Meticulously researched and contextualized with both the historic political and climbing practices of the day and their connections to today’s climbing milieu, this book literally breathes the same air as Comici on the soaring walls and high aeries where he preached aesthetic gospels and practised ground-breaking rock craft. Not only an enjoyable read about an obscure but important figure in climbing, but, as respected climbing author David Roberts avers, “a dazzling achievement.”
Underland: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane, 2019, Hamish Hamilton
Robert Macfarlane (The Old Ways) thinks a lot about time. But in this ode to all things out of sight and beneath our feet, he thinks of it in ways new to both himself and readers. Fastening itself to the dizzying expanses of “deep time,” and broken into three parts—Seeing (Britain), Hiding (Europe) and Haunting (the north)—Underland offers an epic exploration of Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory and the land itself. If you’ve never thought about the underground world (and unless you’re a caver why would you?), Macfarlane offers an extraordinary trip into our relationships with darkness, burial and the planet’s past and future.
Blue Sky Kingdom: An Epic Family Journey to the Heart of the Himalaya, by Bruce Kirkby, 2020, Douglas & McIntyre
Ever thought of changing paths after finding yourself staring into your own dystopian future? For Bruce Kirkby the portal to that moment was scrolling through his cellphone one morning around the breakfast table while his children tried to get his attention. They did—and in a way that launched an epiphany: a growing subjugation to email and social media was the opposite of living, dragging him away from his true self—along with everything and everyone he loved.
In response, Kirkby and family hatched a plan: without setting foot on an airplane they would disconnect completely and make their way to the Himalaya, there to spend three months reflecting, meditating and helping out in a Buddhist monastery in India’s remote Zanskar Valley. By turns funny, insightful, heartwarming, and sad, this slow-travel-meets-high-altitude family sojourn is by far the most daring and unflinching adventure undertaken by an author known for his audacious explorations.
Digging into themes of modern distraction, loss of ancient wisdom, and Kirkby’s personal coming-to-terms with a son’s recent diagnosis on the autism spectrum, Blue Sky Kingdom is the remarkable and readable tale of a family that fled distraction to find connection—both with themselves and the ancient traditions of a disappearing culture.
Horizon, by Barry Lopez. 2020,
Vintage Canada
From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, award-winning author Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams) delivers his most far-ranging yet personal work to date. Horizon moves deeply through the author’s travels to six key regions: western Oregon, the high Arctic, the Galápagos Islands, the deserts of Kenya, Australia’s Botany Bay, and Antarctica. In his inimitably introspective prose, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration and, as always, he searches—beautifully and skilfully—for meaning and purpose in a fraught world.
Leslie Anthony is a biologist, writer and author of several popular books on environmental science
