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Why have women’s encounters with the natural world been largely
airbrushed from history? Do women engage with landscape – be it
writing, exploring, observing, studying, running, climbing or
walking – differently to men? Rachel Hewitt traces the traditions
dominated by men’s experiences, and the ways in which women’s
immersion in nature diverges from the template we have inherited.
In Her Nature will recover experiences and legacies often
overshadowed, unnamed and potentially lost within a canon of nature
writing and history. It will also celebrate an alternative
tradition of women's endeavours that defy an unspoken cultural
norm.
Map of a Nation tells the story of the creation of the Ordnance
Survey map - the first complete, accurate, affordable map of the
British Isles. The Ordnance Survey is a much beloved British
institution, and Map of a Nation is, amazingly, the first popular
history to tell the story of the map and the men who dreamt and
delivered it. The Ordnance Survey's history is one of political
revolutions, rebellions and regional unions that altered the shape
and identity of the United Kingdom over the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. It's also a deliciously readable account of
one of the great untold British adventure stories, featuring
intrepid individuals lugging brass theodolites up mountains to make
the country visible to itself for the first time.
'Heartfelt, passionate, infuriating and often devastating, this
book will inspire you to fight for your right to tread your own
path' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ, author of Invisible Women When Rachel
loses five family members in five months, grief magnifies other
absences. Running across moors and mountains used to help her feel
at home in her body and the world, but now she becomes painfully
aware of her inability to run without being cat-called or followed
by strange men, or to walk alone at night without fear. Her eyes
are opened to injustices facing women in sport, from men who push
her off paths during races, to male bias in competition
regulations, kit and media coverage. The outdoors becomes a place
of danger, sharpening her sense of the grief women experience -
every day, everywhere - for lack of freedom. Rachel goes in search
of a new family: the foremothers who blazed a trail at the dawn of
outdoor sport. She discovers Lizzie Le Blond, a courageous
Anglo-Irishwoman who scaled the Alps in woollen skirts,
photographed fearless women climbing, skating and tobogganing at
breakneck speeds, and founded the Ladies' Alpine Club, defying men
who wanted the mountains to themselves. Yet after such
groundbreaking progress in the late 1800s, a backlash drove women
out of sports and public space. Are we now living through a similar
reversal in women's rights or an era of unprecedented liberty?
Telling Lizzie's story alongside her own, Rachel runs her way from
bereavement to belonging, in a world that feels hostile to women.
On the way she's inspired by the tenacious women, past and present,
who insist that breaking boundaries outdoors is, and always has
been, in her nature.
In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke
called 'the most important of all revolutions...a revolution in
sentiments'. Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals
concocted new political worlds to enshrine healthier, more
productive, human emotions and relationships. The Enlightenment's
wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of such optimists -
including the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas
Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood - who sought to
reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by freeing
desire from repressive constraints. But by the middle of the
decade, the wind had changed. The French Revolution descended into
bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political
activities. In the space of one decade, feverish optimism gave way
to bleak disappointment, and changed the way we think about human
need and longing. A Revolution of Feeling is a vivid and absorbing
account of the dramatic end of the Enlightenment, the beginning of
an emotional landscape preoccupied by guilt, sin, failure,
resignation and repression, and the origins of our contemporary
approach to feeling and desire. Above all, it is the story of the
human cost of political change, of men and women consigned to the
'wrong side of history'. But although their revolutionary proposals
collapsed, that failure resulted in its own cultural revolution - a
revolution of feeling - the aftershocks of which are felt to the
present day.
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Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
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