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moonpix's review against another edition
5.0
The poet John Haines once wrote that “the eternal task of the artist and the poet, the historian and the scholar … is to find the means to reconcile what are two separate and yet inseparable histories, Nature and Culture. To the extent that we can do this, the ‘world’ makes sense to us and can be lived in.” This very long book by Simon Schama is held together by the same central motivation to illuminate how nature and culture are fused together. To this end, Schama argues that these connections are “built from a rich deposit of myths, memories, and obsessions” that endure through time, powerfully shaping our institutions and cultures to this very day. Many of the specific histories Schama chooses to focus on in the book are examples of the influence of cultural ideas of nature, most obviously and consequentially in the role of the landscape in shaping national identity.
An important aspect of his argument is how in the long history of humankind there have been many conflicting myths about the same landscapes, myths that often manifest simultaneously in time. One of the many examples given on the different ways landscapes shape national identity is the cultural memory of mountains, where “the Romantics who saw in the mountains the refutation of imperial ambition coexisted with hearty patriots for whom the peak represented an occasion to demonstrate imperial strength”. As is often the case with the illogic of ideology, drawing out these contradictions, while important work, does little to dispel their power.
Perhaps this is part of why he argues, most effectively in the masterful section on German postwar painter Anselm Kiefer, that “democracy … averts its face from these myths at its peril. To exercise their spell means, to some extent, understanding their potency at close quarters, even, perhaps, within contamination range”. The book attempts this difficult task of taking myth seriously while still maintaining a “critical distance” from it, understanding it as a “historical phenomenon” rather than as intrinsic truth.
For Schama, this critical distance means being open about personal influences and biases rather than pretending that they do not exist. While this is first and foremost a general history, Schama often inserts personal stories and impressions of landscapes he has visited or has a special connection to. His analysis is clearly informed by his own Jewish Lithuanian family history, his experiences growing up in Britain, and his relationship to Israel. But even without these biographical insights, it is clear that his understanding of how conflicting myths about national identity can exist simultaneously in the same location is deeply informed by the relationship between Israel and Palestine. In fact, Israeli landscape traditions set the scene for the entire book: they are described in the introduction, where Schama recounts the practice of tree planting in Israel.
He writes of how he participated in this tradition from a distance as a child in Britain, and of its wider religious and cultural roots. But no space is given to the history of the Palestinian people, and the dark side of the practice of tree planting is never fully addressed. In the ethnographer Irus Braverman’s article interviewing those who have participated in and been affected by the tradition, she describes how “nature not only provides Zionist narratives with a temporal bridge between antiquity and modernity but also remakes the landscape in a particular way that excludes the other”. The first aspect of this, the bridge between past and present, is laid out in Schama’s descriptions, where tree planting symbolizes how “the irresistible cycle of vegetation, where death merely composted the process of rebirth, seemed to promise true national immortality”. But the second aspect of this, the exclusionary remaking of the landscape, is elided. What is not discussed in the book and what I learned on my own is that, as Braverman writes, these pine forests “have provided a green cover to hide the presence of demolished Palestinian villages, thereby preventing Palestinians from returning to their lands after the wars of 1948 and 1967 … eras[ing] any other landscape but itself”. Schama is well aware of the legitimizing power of history and narrative, as well as landscape, and while I largely admire how his descriptive ‘show-don’t-tell’ style demands an active reader willing to make their own connections, to omit this particular context here is a telling misstep.
Edward Said drew on Landscape and Memory in his essay Invention, Memory, and Place, where he wrote that “the unending cultural struggle over territory … necessarily involves overlapping memories, narratives, and physical structures”. This is something Schama is intimately aware of, and it is a theme he returns to again and again, in many different locations and periods. This only makes it more glaring that when it comes to Israel and Palestine, this same struggle is only ever alluded to, never directly addressed. It is hard to criticize a 600+ page book for leaving something out, but this is where I found its largely Western focus most troubling. For while Schama has the lofty goal of treating myth seriously without ever fully giving into its power, one could argue that he has already fallen prey to at least some very potent myths.
In the same essay, Said also wrote that “the interplay among memory, place, and invention can do if it is not to be used for the purposes of exclusion, that is, if it is to be used for liberation and coexistence between societies whose adjacency requires a tolerable form of sustained reconciliation”. If nature and culture are as interconnected as Schama argues they are (and I am inclined to agree in that regard), then these complexities also require the acceptance of the accompanying pluralities of myth and tradition. And if every landscape is pluricultural, then we all must find ways to identify with the landscape without attempting to take ownership over its narratives and its history, as well as its literal geographies.
“It seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrarch’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. For within its bag are fruitful gifts— not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though it may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has ground the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalist supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.“
An important aspect of his argument is how in the long history of humankind there have been many conflicting myths about the same landscapes, myths that often manifest simultaneously in time. One of the many examples given on the different ways landscapes shape national identity is the cultural memory of mountains, where “the Romantics who saw in the mountains the refutation of imperial ambition coexisted with hearty patriots for whom the peak represented an occasion to demonstrate imperial strength”. As is often the case with the illogic of ideology, drawing out these contradictions, while important work, does little to dispel their power.
Perhaps this is part of why he argues, most effectively in the masterful section on German postwar painter Anselm Kiefer, that “democracy … averts its face from these myths at its peril. To exercise their spell means, to some extent, understanding their potency at close quarters, even, perhaps, within contamination range”. The book attempts this difficult task of taking myth seriously while still maintaining a “critical distance” from it, understanding it as a “historical phenomenon” rather than as intrinsic truth.
For Schama, this critical distance means being open about personal influences and biases rather than pretending that they do not exist. While this is first and foremost a general history, Schama often inserts personal stories and impressions of landscapes he has visited or has a special connection to. His analysis is clearly informed by his own Jewish Lithuanian family history, his experiences growing up in Britain, and his relationship to Israel. But even without these biographical insights, it is clear that his understanding of how conflicting myths about national identity can exist simultaneously in the same location is deeply informed by the relationship between Israel and Palestine. In fact, Israeli landscape traditions set the scene for the entire book: they are described in the introduction, where Schama recounts the practice of tree planting in Israel.
He writes of how he participated in this tradition from a distance as a child in Britain, and of its wider religious and cultural roots. But no space is given to the history of the Palestinian people, and the dark side of the practice of tree planting is never fully addressed. In the ethnographer Irus Braverman’s article interviewing those who have participated in and been affected by the tradition, she describes how “nature not only provides Zionist narratives with a temporal bridge between antiquity and modernity but also remakes the landscape in a particular way that excludes the other”. The first aspect of this, the bridge between past and present, is laid out in Schama’s descriptions, where tree planting symbolizes how “the irresistible cycle of vegetation, where death merely composted the process of rebirth, seemed to promise true national immortality”. But the second aspect of this, the exclusionary remaking of the landscape, is elided. What is not discussed in the book and what I learned on my own is that, as Braverman writes, these pine forests “have provided a green cover to hide the presence of demolished Palestinian villages, thereby preventing Palestinians from returning to their lands after the wars of 1948 and 1967 … eras[ing] any other landscape but itself”. Schama is well aware of the legitimizing power of history and narrative, as well as landscape, and while I largely admire how his descriptive ‘show-don’t-tell’ style demands an active reader willing to make their own connections, to omit this particular context here is a telling misstep.
Edward Said drew on Landscape and Memory in his essay Invention, Memory, and Place, where he wrote that “the unending cultural struggle over territory … necessarily involves overlapping memories, narratives, and physical structures”. This is something Schama is intimately aware of, and it is a theme he returns to again and again, in many different locations and periods. This only makes it more glaring that when it comes to Israel and Palestine, this same struggle is only ever alluded to, never directly addressed. It is hard to criticize a 600+ page book for leaving something out, but this is where I found its largely Western focus most troubling. For while Schama has the lofty goal of treating myth seriously without ever fully giving into its power, one could argue that he has already fallen prey to at least some very potent myths.
In the same essay, Said also wrote that “the interplay among memory, place, and invention can do if it is not to be used for the purposes of exclusion, that is, if it is to be used for liberation and coexistence between societies whose adjacency requires a tolerable form of sustained reconciliation”. If nature and culture are as interconnected as Schama argues they are (and I am inclined to agree in that regard), then these complexities also require the acceptance of the accompanying pluralities of myth and tradition. And if every landscape is pluricultural, then we all must find ways to identify with the landscape without attempting to take ownership over its narratives and its history, as well as its literal geographies.
“It seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrarch’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. For within its bag are fruitful gifts— not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though it may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has ground the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalist supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.“
nuthatch's review against another edition
4.0
I thought I would never finish this book. It isn't something I would recommend to everyone but it was worth reading. I really felt the shortcomings of an American education while reading this. I would have benefited from knowing a bit of French and Latin as well as knowing more about European history.
ignimbrite's review against another edition
4.0
Landscape and Memory is a long book. It is hard not to be impressed by the shear number of pages Simon Schama can put out. And his subject matter - the cultural perception of landscape and its use in national discourses - is one I enjoy. This is an incredibly broad-brush view of the subject, meandering through Lithuanian forests to Bernini's fountains and the gardens at Versaille, then on to Mount Rushmore, to name a small sampling of the locations he grazes. There are wonderful passages in this book. One of his biggest strengths is his incorporation of art criticism into historical narrative, so the 600+ pages are adorned with beautiful paintings and woodcuts. Perhaps an art historian would not be impressed, but I love it.
Like most of Schama's writing, Landscape and Memory is less about furthering a complex, nuanced argument than about taking a leisurely stroll through the things Simon Schama finds interesting. This can be fun if you have a lot of time and a lot of patience. (I read this monster in chunks on the train.) Otherwise, this is a fun book to skim, oogling the pretty pictures as you pass.
Like most of Schama's writing, Landscape and Memory is less about furthering a complex, nuanced argument than about taking a leisurely stroll through the things Simon Schama finds interesting. This can be fun if you have a lot of time and a lot of patience. (I read this monster in chunks on the train.) Otherwise, this is a fun book to skim, oogling the pretty pictures as you pass.
emiann2023's review against another edition
5.0
This is a monster of a book, in terms of pages, but Schama writes with such elegance and wit that it is a pleasant journey. While meandering through the various landscapes and locations, the reader also meanders through time, meeting and getting to know a variety of people all through time.
Always a pleasure to read Simon's works. I cannot wait to read more.
Always a pleasure to read Simon's works. I cannot wait to read more.
mat_tobin's review against another edition
5.0
Schama's book explores a history of how mankind has shaped and been shaped by the natural world. As with all of Schama's writing, there is a sense of poetry and storytelling and a link to, in a sense, his own autobiography. His own critical reading of both art and culture's manipulation and mastery over the environment is presented more as a luxurious narrative rather than strictly informative - there is no clinical distance here but rather a weaving of multiple stories each which highlight the Western ideologue of what landscape represents. You could argue that Schama sees history as a form of art and art as a form of history. Although there may not have been as much as I wanted or needed from such a hefty text, it was still a fascinating read.
bibliothecarivs's review against another edition
5.0
This book is a fascinating treatise on the role nature (specifically wood, water, and rock) has played in Western culture. Art and history professor at Columbia University, Schama considered this the one book he needed to write. He expertly touches on so many examples of our environment's influence on our collective memory that the book is difficult to describe- everything from Hitler's obsession with the forests of Europe and the battles fought to get Susan B. Anthony on Mount Rushmore, to Western lust for Egyptian obelisks and dance parties held on the massive stumps of California Sequoias in the mid-nineteenth century. This work is also, with its classical layout and type font and its many excellent illustrations, one of the most beautifully designed books I've ever seen. Highly recommended.
bremser's review against another edition
2.0
Lacks focus - Schama can and will use any bit of history or tangent to illustrate broad themes which could have been condensed into a long article. This is entertaining at times, like watching a talented college professor that's very stoned riff on history for hour after hour. But it's a 672 page book.
kikiandarrowsfishshelf's review against another edition
4.0
About a year ago, I was watching Animal Plant or the National Geographic channel. I can't remember which one. Anyhow, there was this American, you know the kind that makes all Americans cringe. He was going in some cave filled with water and bat poop to look at snakes. He made this poor snake barf up its meal of bat to prove that snakes kill bats in the dark. He let the snake back in the murk, and a couple minutes got bite by a snake (if there is any justice, the same snake). The snake wasn't posionous (it was a type of constrictor), but its teeth were sharp and the guy was walking in water mixed with bat poop (why, he thought this was a good thing, I don't know). To be fair, it looked like the snake got him pretty good. So nature guy leaves the cave and starts the long hike back to the truck (cause the cave is in the middle of nowhere), complaining all the time about how he's making the hike alone and so it's hard because the bite hurts.
All the time, however, you can see the camera man's legs.
Schama's book isn't like that nature guy, who got to keep his leg. What the book does, in some ways, is explain why guys like that get television shows.
People are conflicted about landscapes see. Men went to conquer them, and women, according to Schama, went to have union with them.
I haven't read anything by Schama before. I have watched and also own on DVD, his History of Britain and The Power of Art (which is good, but not as good as Private Life of a Masterpiece). I like them, and Schama seems smart, but I can't take his facial expressions when he talks. It's like he has this combination of smelling something icky, mixed with disdain. It's werid. The voice is no problem, but his facial expression freak me out.
It's actually a pretty good book because there are no facial expressions. True in some parts, it seems as if Schama is writing to just to read himself, but in other parts he seems brillant.
Schama covers the politics around the history of the Robin Hood legend as well as the building of fountains and waterworks. He describes how people have viewed arcadia, rock, tree, and water. He focuses, it should be noted, on Western culture for the most part. France, Italy, England, and the USA make up most of the work.
I found the part about Mt. Rushmore to be intersting because I hadn't known that there was a movement to put Susan B. Anthony on the mountain. Schama describes that sequence with humor and empathy.
All the time, however, you can see the camera man's legs.
Schama's book isn't like that nature guy, who got to keep his leg. What the book does, in some ways, is explain why guys like that get television shows.
People are conflicted about landscapes see. Men went to conquer them, and women, according to Schama, went to have union with them.
I haven't read anything by Schama before. I have watched and also own on DVD, his History of Britain and The Power of Art (which is good, but not as good as Private Life of a Masterpiece). I like them, and Schama seems smart, but I can't take his facial expressions when he talks. It's like he has this combination of smelling something icky, mixed with disdain. It's werid. The voice is no problem, but his facial expression freak me out.
It's actually a pretty good book because there are no facial expressions. True in some parts, it seems as if Schama is writing to just to read himself, but in other parts he seems brillant.
Schama covers the politics around the history of the Robin Hood legend as well as the building of fountains and waterworks. He describes how people have viewed arcadia, rock, tree, and water. He focuses, it should be noted, on Western culture for the most part. France, Italy, England, and the USA make up most of the work.
I found the part about Mt. Rushmore to be intersting because I hadn't known that there was a movement to put Susan B. Anthony on the mountain. Schama describes that sequence with humor and empathy.
snooty1's review
3.0
At times I felt that I knew exactly what this book was about, other times I had no idea what the author was trying to convey.
In theory, I think I understood what this book was to be about, how landscape shapes culture/thought/myth. But then it felt that a lot of the time we were down rabbit holes with no light in sight.
Schama looks at forests/water/rocks as the shapers of not only the landscape but of the civilizations they created/molded, and vice versa.
All in all, it was a bit much. I found myself lost in the text, frequently wondering when the point would be coming. Other times, I was completely engrossed.
In theory, I think I understood what this book was to be about, how landscape shapes culture/thought/myth. But then it felt that a lot of the time we were down rabbit holes with no light in sight.
Schama looks at forests/water/rocks as the shapers of not only the landscape but of the civilizations they created/molded, and vice versa.
All in all, it was a bit much. I found myself lost in the text, frequently wondering when the point would be coming. Other times, I was completely engrossed.