An entrancing, sun-drenched bicycle journey, from the beaches of southern Spain to solar temples in the Outer Hebrides. In this great feast of armchair travel, John Hanson Mitchell tells of his fifteen-hundred-mile ride on a trusty old Peugeot bicycle from the port of Cadiz to just below the Arctic Circle. He follows the European spring up through southern Spain, the wine and oyster country near Bordeaux, to Versailles (the palace of the "Sun King"), Wordsworth's Lake District, precipitous Scottish highlands, and finally to a Druid temple on the island of Lewis in the Hebrides, a place where Midsummer is celebrated in pagan majesty as the near-midnight sun dips and then quickly rises over the horizon. In true John Mitchell fashion this journey is interspersed with myth, natural history, and ritual, all revolving around the lure and lore of the sun, culturally and historically. The journey is as delicious as it is fascinating, with an appeal for all those who look south in February and are drawn to dunes, picnics under castle walls, spring flowers, terraced vineyards, Moorish outposts, magic and celebrations. In short, to everything under the sun. A Merloyd Lawrence Book
**
From Publishers Weekly
After last year's The Wildest Place on Earth, the caustic travel writer picked up his knapsack, pumped up his Peugeot and set out once again on the back roads. This time Mitchell cycled from the southern plains of Andalusia, in Spain, to Scotland's northernmost isles, chasing the encroaching summer in search of our only pantheistic deity, the sun. Appropriately, the text is most evocative in the indolent stretches of the sun-washed south, and Mitchell's penchant for reported speech offers a fascinating picture of Europe. His Spain is warm and effusive, his France lazy, rich and proud; England he likes less, and he struggles to find merit amid the smalltown claustrophobia of southern Albion. But the lonely wilderness and secluded hills of Scotland are most attractive to Mitchell, who prefers the company of his bicycle to that of other people. Awkwardly, it is Mitchell's preference for solitude that mars his typically generous prose, for he is surprisingly judgmental about other cultures and habitually moralizes about the laissez-faire lifestyles of his expat friends. Uncomfortable, too, is his almost overbearingly poetic narrative style, saved from whimsy only by erudite interjections on sun worship through time. This is a staggering journey, a spatial and temporal trek through centuries of heliocentric faith, where the author encounters everyone from New Age archeologists to luminist painters and naturalist bathers, united only in their adulation of the one true sun.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
John Hanson Mitchell is the author of The Wildest Place on Earth, Ceremonial Time, and Trespassing and the editor of Sanctuary, the journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Winner of the 1994 John Burroughs Essay Award, he received the 2000 New England Booksellers' Award for his body of work. He lives in Littleton, Massachusetts.
Description:
An entrancing, sun-drenched bicycle journey, from the beaches of southern Spain to solar temples in the Outer Hebrides. In this great feast of armchair travel, John Hanson Mitchell tells of his fifteen-hundred-mile ride on a trusty old Peugeot bicycle from the port of Cadiz to just below the Arctic Circle. He follows the European spring up through southern Spain, the wine and oyster country near Bordeaux, to Versailles (the palace of the "Sun King"), Wordsworth's Lake District, precipitous Scottish highlands, and finally to a Druid temple on the island of Lewis in the Hebrides, a place where Midsummer is celebrated in pagan majesty as the near-midnight sun dips and then quickly rises over the horizon. In true John Mitchell fashion this journey is interspersed with myth, natural history, and ritual, all revolving around the lure and lore of the sun, culturally and historically. The journey is as delicious as it is fascinating, with an appeal for all those who look south in February and are drawn to dunes, picnics under castle walls, spring flowers, terraced vineyards, Moorish outposts, magic and celebrations. In short, to everything under the sun. A Merloyd Lawrence Book
**
From Publishers Weekly
After last year's The Wildest Place on Earth, the caustic travel writer picked up his knapsack, pumped up his Peugeot and set out once again on the back roads. This time Mitchell cycled from the southern plains of Andalusia, in Spain, to Scotland's northernmost isles, chasing the encroaching summer in search of our only pantheistic deity, the sun. Appropriately, the text is most evocative in the indolent stretches of the sun-washed south, and Mitchell's penchant for reported speech offers a fascinating picture of Europe. His Spain is warm and effusive, his France lazy, rich and proud; England he likes less, and he struggles to find merit amid the smalltown claustrophobia of southern Albion. But the lonely wilderness and secluded hills of Scotland are most attractive to Mitchell, who prefers the company of his bicycle to that of other people. Awkwardly, it is Mitchell's preference for solitude that mars his typically generous prose, for he is surprisingly judgmental about other cultures and habitually moralizes about the laissez-faire lifestyles of his expat friends. Uncomfortable, too, is his almost overbearingly poetic narrative style, saved from whimsy only by erudite interjections on sun worship through time. This is a staggering journey, a spatial and temporal trek through centuries of heliocentric faith, where the author encounters everyone from New Age archeologists to luminist painters and naturalist bathers, united only in their adulation of the one true sun.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
John Hanson Mitchell is the author of The Wildest Place on Earth, Ceremonial Time, and Trespassing and the editor of Sanctuary, the journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Winner of the 1994 John Burroughs Essay Award, he received the 2000 New England Booksellers' Award for his body of work. He lives in Littleton, Massachusetts.