Latitudes
Encounters with a Changing Planet
Meditative and sumptuous, Latitudes is Jean McNeil’s brooding memoir covering travels to remote landscapes; it ruminates on the unsettling impacts of climate change.
McNeil is an inquisitive, restless traveler who crafts beautiful and profound passages about her journeys to unusual places. In this book, she describes her diverse adventures, including touring the cloud forests of Costa Rica, training as a professional safari guide in Kenya, joining a scientific expedition to Greenland, trekking the savannas of Namibia and South Africa, exploring the Falkland Islands, and spending months on the ice fields of Antarctica with a movie crew. Her language is fresh and probing. She marvels as a herd of impala “chevron over the land as they perform faultless arabesques,” observes the “gruff seagulls stutter[ing] outside,” and considers the “scar of bustards in the sky” and the “whisper of the swishing land-sea-grass in the wind.”
McNeil writes often about the transformative power of land, which she describes as “a spirit mentor, an aggrieved giant white bird, an old, old will.” She stresses the impacts of climate change, which she sees as the tragic consequences of humanity’s destruction of the planet for profit. She predicts a future where the emerald grasslands of Kenya are cracked and tarred and the “hardscrabble” town of Ilulissat, Greenland, is a mecca like Paris when much of the planet is too hot to survive. She writes, briefly, of conservation successes in Costa Rica, where 25 percent of the land has been set aside for national parks and natural areas. But her emphasis is on documenting the effects of climate change, not proposing solutions.
Depicting the splendor of diverse landscapes around the globe, Latitudes is a rich, textured portrait of the natural world and a plaintive reflection on the destruction of climate change.
Reviewed by
Kristen Rabe
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