cover image What is Landscape?

What is Landscape?

John R. Stilgoe. MIT, $19.95 (280p) ISBN 978-0-262-02989-6

Landscape professor Stilgoe (Old Fields) compiles a thoughtful collection of historical anecdotes, ruminations, and common and abstruse terms concerning his specialty. For his purposes, he defines landscape as a word "naming the skeleton and sinews of shaped land" and as a subject best studied through a process of careful, reflective observation%E2%80%94one involving frequent recourse to a dictionary. Part vocabulary list and part conversational lecture, Stilgoe's frequently digressive verbal ramble through the enduring evidence of human efforts to tame and occupy open spaces leads most often to language, etymology, and history. Once he finishes a long initial meditation on landscape as an act of perception, imagination, and linguistic evolution, Stilgoe moves onto a historically grounded assessment of such features as homes, farms, roads, and fields, yielding a rich and entertaining understanding of how centuries-old practices of land use are embedded in terminology still used today. Aimed at an audience with the leisure to take long walks and the means of accessing the countryside, Stilgoe's book champions landscape studies as a discipline founded on curiosity and deep, associative thought, open to byways, discovery, and the occasional absurdity, rewarding for amateurs and seasoned practitioners alike. (Oct.)