Starred review from April 15, 2017
There is a sense at the start of Man Booker Prize short-listed author Winton's (Eyrie, 2014) personal and cultural panorama of Australia that one has traveled too far off the map and become hopelessly lost in his transporting, place-specific language. Indigenous particularities feed Winton's life story and prose, and the landscape reads as alien and all-encompassing in its beauty, enormity, and seclusion. And it is all, as Winton details, imperiled. His passion to save this land shapes finely wrought chapters that mark significant years and locales in his life. In one telling passage, Winton describes looking at photographs of his Australian ancestors and seeing not the Northern Hemispheric optimism in frontier endeavors but rather genuine fear and apprehension stamped timelessly on their faces. Yet it is Winton's childhood memories of crouching in the bush and craggy beach caves that an innate sense of wonder surpasses the survivalist instinct to flee from dangerous slime-spewing fish or cower in the shadow of car-sized tree trunks. The world's largest island deserves nothing less than Winton's beautifully curated, intimate, environmentally sensitive history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)