Land

A friend of mine took one look at the cover of this book and said, ‘Oof! That looks dry.’ And I can see what she meant. A picture of square green fields, flat white lettering and a sub-title that takes up about as much space as the title itself. It looks like a dull, weighty text sociology students struggle through page by page, cursing the day the author ever put pen to paper.

Wrong!

This is a book about the world we live in and the ground we walk upon. It’s about everything the word 'land' entails. It's about maps and borders, ownership and stewardship, nurturing, destruction and outright theft. It describes how the Dutch created an entire new province (Flevoland) from the waters of the Zuider Zee, and how Scottish crofters were forced from their homes in the  Highland clearances. It's about the partition of India in 1947 (by an English lawyer who’d never been further east than Paris) and about what can happen when you attempt to let a stretch of land  run its natural course (the Ooostvaderseplassen in the Netherlands.)

There are stories of Japanese internment in World War II; of a zealously guarded private forest covering vast stretches of Montana and Idaho; of the dangers of fracking; of Robert Mugabe’s disastrous agricultural policy in Zimbabwe; and of a Hebridean island with a population of six. The book is packed with stories from all over the world, all of them told in Simon Winchester’s compulsively readable manner. And all of which, when taken together, paint a picture of what that one word – land – actually means.

I think it’s one of his best books. And it’s anything but dry.