Latitudes - Encounters with a Changing Planet

"Relating thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes is a thrilling and thought-provoking exploration of a changing planet. At once memoir, journal and travelogue of Earth's wildernesses, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada."--Provided by publisher

List of contents

Prologue	ix
Part I: We Walked Out of This Land	1
Ephemeral	8
Running	13
The Edge of Reality	17
The Quenching	23
The Trophic Pyramid	28
Part II: The Bowl of Winter	35
Uncharted Waters	42
Albedo	48
Paleo People	54
Ilulissat	59
Hotel Arctic	63
Part III: The End of Desire	71
Las Islas	78
Stone Runs	83
Storm Petrel	90
Part IV: Bitter Pastoral	99
The Land With No Fat	105
The Skeleton Coast	110
Part V: The Blue Desert	121
Departures	132
The Ninth Wave	135
Crossing the Line	141
Dark Ocean	148
Part VI: Bush of Ghosts	157
Lion Charge	163
The Ivory Trail	169
The Firing Range	176
Black Mamba	180
Part VII: The Land of Letting Go	191
Bluefields	197
Magic!	202
The Last Glacial Maximum	210
The Far Field	216
Part VIII: The Rainy Season	221
Cloudforest	227
All Men Want to Know	232
Currents	237
Part IX: Boreal	243
The Quickening	251
Latitudes	257
Epilogue	261
Acknowledgements	267

About the author

Jean McNeil is originally from Nova Scotia, Canada. She has published fifteen books, spanning fiction, memoir, poetry, essays and travel. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Journey Prize for Short Fiction, the Elizabeth Jolley Prize, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation literary awards (twice) and the Pushcart Prize. She has twice won the Prism International Prize, once for short fiction and again for creative non-fiction. Her account of being writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, Ice Diaries, won both the Adventure Travel and Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2016. Her most recent novel, Day for Night, was awarded the gold medal in the literary fiction category of the Independent Publishers Awards in the US in 2022.

She has been writer in residence with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, with the Natural Environment Research Council in Greenland, and has undertaken official residencies in the Falkland Islands and in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic. For the past 15 years she has lived for part of the year in South Africa and Kenya, where she is a trained safari guide. McNeil is Professor and Director of the Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia and lives in London.

Summary

From an unparalleled life of extreme encounters with the natural world, Jean McNeil brings us keen insights on how to respond to a changing planet.

As a young girl in Nova Scotia, her grandmother taught her to shoot animals for food and she rescued a wolf fallen through ice. Where do you go from there? Cross Arctic seas, become a professional African safari guide, deliver the guidebook to Costa Rica, lock yourself in an Antarctic research station, write your heart out. All the while keep listening, for the living world is speaking to you if you open yourself to hear its voice.

We are obsessed with human stories. What happens if we shift focus and bond with the non-human? Read Latitudes and enter the natural world on its own terms.

 

"Shimmering prose, which walks us through the most remote of lands and sails us over the darkest of oceans - both psychic and literal - gives solace and new ways to imagine how we might live cooperatively with our planetary home." - Margie Orford

Foreword

• Travel Features: Antarctica, the Arctic, Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, the Atlantic Ocean, the Falkland Islands, Greenland, Costa Rica and Canada. Jean is the author of The Rough Guide to Costa Rica and a contributor to several other guidebooks in their series on Latin American countries. Subjects: Jean is an authority on travel guides and their changing character – moving from print to digital. We will be targeting travel podcasts and features in travel / outdoors magazines.
• Lifestyle – training to be a professional safari guide as a woman,  great for feature / podcast material.
• Science – Jean has been the official writer in residence with the British Antarctic Survey, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar Research and the Natural Environment Research Council. As a Professor at the University of East Anglia she works on several projects about the intersection between climate change science and the arts, an in particular on climate narratives. This is a title for science and environmental shelves.

Product details

• Authors: Jean McNeil
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 05.11.2024, delayed
• EAN: 9781909954113
• ISBN: 978-1-909954-11-3
• No. of pages: 280
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; SCIENCE / Global Warming & Climate Change, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women, TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues, NATURE / Ecology, Nature & the natural world: general interest, Literary essays