This is a book about silences. And land. Renowned anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes: childhood in England in the shadow of the Second World War, the Derbyshire hills, a kibbutz in Israel and the deep Canadian Arctic. Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother's home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape - but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences. He takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive. As he reveals, the realities of the far north were a joy, but even there he found abuses of the people and the land - and voices that were deeply silenced by the forces of colonialism. In these landscapes, human well-being appears to be both possible and impossible. Yet in memory, in the land, in the defiance of silence, Hugh Brody sees a profound humanity - as well as hope.

This is a book about silences. And land. Renowned anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes: childhood in England in the shadow of the Second World War, the Derbyshire hills, a kibbutz in Israel and the deep Canadian Arctic. Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother's home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape - but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences. He takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive. As he reveals, the realities of the far north were a joy, but even there he found abuses of the people and the land - and voices that were deeply silenced by the forces of colonialism. In these landscapes, human well-being appears to be both possible and impossible. Yet in memory, in the land, in the defiance of silence, Hugh Brody sees a profound humanity - as well as hope.

LIFE ON THE LINE began as a project by London-based photographer Cristian Barnett. Over a number of years he aimed to make a number of journeys to the Arctic Circle, an invisible line of latitude 66 degrees and 33 minutes north of the Equator. The line intersects eight countries and is home to a rich diversity of peoples for whom the sun never sets in high summer, nor rises in deepest winter. All the photographs were taken on film within 35 miles of the Arctic Circle.LIFE ON THE LINE celebrates the variety of existence in the circumpolar Arctic, in the face of overwhelming environmental and cultural change. "This is not a book about history, either of the North or photography. The journey of these photographs is through the modernity of life as it is lived along the Arctic Circle. Much is startling to those who live in the south, since for us it as an extreme world that we see here. But much is familiar. Everywhere people live with what the modern world has to offer, even if at times, and for profound reasons, they prefer or need to step into territories, of landscape, culture or the human imagination, that is outside and beyond modernity.As we look at these northern people looking out at us, we see both a welcome and fascination. This is the power and authority of these images, the remarkable achievement of a remarkable photographer." - Hugh Brody.

Hugh Brody has an international reputation as an anthropologist and documentary film-maker of the Inuit peoples. This book is a marvellous account of hunter-gatherer culture, gleaned from years of living and hunting with the Inuits of the Arctic and the salmon-fishing tribes in the Canadian Northwest. Brody explores the frontiers between hunters and farmers, and shows us how the encounter between radically different ways of being in the world is at the core of human history. He travels through exquisite landscapes of ice and snow, with people who know the land as part of their selves. Posing the question, 'Why did the farmer triumph over the hunter-gatherer?', Brody finds answers in a variety of places, among them the Book of Genesis, the great creation myth at the centre of the agriculturalist view of the world. This is a book that invites the reader to embark on a series of expeditions, into the territories of hunter-gatherers, and into radical ideas about what it means to be human in the present, and what it could mean in the future.

Hugh Brody crystallizes three decades of studying, learning from, crusading for, and thinking about hunter-gatherers in this profound and provocative book. Contrary to stereotype, he says, it is the farmers and their colonizing descendants—ourselves—who are the true nomads, doomed to the geographical and spiritual restlessness embodied in the story of Genesis. By contrast, the hunters have a deep attachment to the place and ways of their ancestors that stems from an enviable sense, distinctively expressed in thought, word, and act, of being part of the fabric of the natural and spiritual worlds.