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Title details for The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin - Available

The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin
ebook
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International Bestseller: The famed travel writer and author of In Patagonia traverses Australia, exploring Aboriginal culture and song—and humanity’s origins.
Long ago, the creators wandered Australia and sang the landscape into being, naming every rock, tree, and watering hole in the great desert. Those songs were passed down to the Aboriginals, and for centuries they have served not only as a shared heritage but as a living map. Sing the right song, and it can guide you across the desert. Lose the words, and you will die.
 
Into this landscape steps Bruce Chatwin, the greatest travel writer of his generation, who comes to Australia to learn these songs. A born wanderer, whose lust for adventure has carried him to the farthest reaches of the globe, Chatwin is entranced by the cultural heritage of the Aboriginals. As he struggles to find the deepest meaning of these ancient, living songs, he is forced to embark on a much more difficult journey—through his own history—to reckon with the nature of language itself.
 
Part travelogue, part memoir, part novel, The Songlines is one of Bruce Chatwin’s final—and most ambitious—works. From the author of the bestselling In Patagonia and On the Black Hill, a sweeping exploration of a landscape, a people, and one man’s history, it is the sort of book that changes the reader forever.
 
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Bruce Chatwin including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.
 

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 18, 2016

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781504038331
      • File size: 5266 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781504038331
      • File size: 6081 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 4, 1987
      In his new book, Chatwin (In Patagonia, etc.) explores the area around Alice Springs, in central Australia, where he ponders the source and meaning of nomadism, the origins of human violence and the emergence of mankind amid arid conditions. Searching for "Songlines''the invisible pathways along which aboriginal Australians travel to perform their central cultural activitiesChatwin is accompanied by Arkady Volchok, a native Australian and tireless bushwalker who is helping the aboriginals protect their sacred sites through the provisions of the Land Rights Act. Chatwin's description of his adventures in the bush forms the most entertaining part of the book, but he also includes long quotations from other writersanthropologists, biologists, even poets. These secondary materials provide a resonant backdrop for the author's reflections on the distinctions between settled people and wanderers, between human aggression and pacifism. First serial to the New York Review of Books.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 3, 1988
      PW praised Chatwin's "entertaining'' and ``resonant'' reflections on the distinctions between settled people and wanderers, and between human aggression and pacifism, as he searches central Australia for the pathways along which aborigines travel to perform their cultural activities.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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