Mrill Ingram.

• Author: Ingram, Mrill
• Position: BOOKS

One gets the feeling that, in the company of author Barry Lopez, one might get a little bit cold. It's hard to imagine snuggling up for warmth, as he sits for hours, letting vast landscapes unfold before him.

In Desert Notes, published in 1976, River Notes in 1979, Arctic Dreams in 1986, and now the long-awaited, 500-page Horizon in 2019, Lopez presents far-away places like few other writers. He engages the full round of human faculties to take the "measure" of each place--a painter's sense of color and perspective, a hunter's alertness to sound and movement, a musician's sensitivity to sound--interwoven with a powerful grasp of history and science. After a while, you feel like you are viewing a layered landscape painting that looks entirely different viewed close up than from a distance.

In Horizon (Knopf), Lopez revisits six previously explored destinations. He watches a storm gather over the Pacific off the Oregon coast, glassing long-tailed ducks on Canada's Skraeling Island in the Arctic, and gets oriented in the "porcelain white" of the Transantarctic Mountains. Meanwhile, we are offered a sympathetic take on the explorer James Cook, and given an intimate glimpse of archaeologists grasping for details of the prehistoric Arctic Thule people.

Lopez has dedicated his life to gaining knowledge about the Earth from its...