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
"McNeil's deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It's captivating stuff." Publishers Weekly
"Meditative and sumptuous… Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change." Foreword Reviews
"Full of lived experience, this book ponders the question of our own animal relationship with the planet, between what we know and what we feel, between mind and body, instinct and intellect." Julia Bell, author of Massive and Hymnal
"Her shimmering prose brings into sharp focus the beauty of the remote places where we can glimpse – and sometimes hear – what our planet was like before us. And what it might be in the silence that will come after the frenzy of human dominance." Margie Orford
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.
Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an age of dramatic ecological loss. It shows us the importance of listening to the living world that is speaking to us, if we open ourselves to hear its voice.
