ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES  • NPR •  THE GUARDIAN From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.   Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world. “At once reverie and urgent appeal, Horizon is beautiful and brutal—a story of the universal human condition, set in some of the most distinctive places on earth. Lopez [searches] both memory and meticulously recorded field notes, mining accumulated wisdom, seeking glimmers of hope. One of the strongest messages in Horizon is that without learning to embrace diversity, without listening to the tales told by cultures other than our own, we risk obliteration. Lopez’s reverence for exploring every corner of the world is infectious, [and] his knack for making friends in the most unlikely places resonates long after you turn the last page. ‘Are we not bound,’ he asks, ‘to learn how to speak with each other?’” —Hillary Rosner,  The New York Times Book Review “Sublime, dreamlike. One of America’s foremost naturalist writers, Lopez is a welcoming host as he brings you across the world . . . Above all else, he wants us to consider. To find context and connections. To think about where to go from here. To take our time.  Horizon  is a contemplation of Lopez’s belief that the only way forward is compassionately, and together.”  —Genevieve Valentine,  NPR “In Horizon , Lopez is remapping the world, revisiting places of surprising starkness and beauty, bring[ing] enormous questions down to earth by rooting them in a series of landscapes. Horizon is an interrogative autobiography . . . In beautiful prose, with characteristic modesty, he has taught the reader to trust him, as a privileged witness of his own being and all the different worlds he has urged it to inhabit. There’s an extraordinary delicacy in the way he relates to traditional, indigenous wisdom and the people who sustain it. ‘Diversity is not a mere characteristic of life,’ Lopez writes. It’s ‘a condition necessary for life.’ He means more than biological diversity: diversity of languages and cultures, of behaviors and wisdoms that have vanished. How can we keep the future from crushing the wisdom of the past altogether? Throughout his career Lopez has insisted on the possibilities of our better nature while examining the evidence of our worse. He never made a habit of rising up in judgment or condemnation; instead he wonders, what would it mean to understand our place in the universe? What sort of courage would it take to admit that we don’t? He wants to find out whether the answers to these questions might make a difference in where we’re headed.” —Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Review of Books “Beautifully composed [with] steady intellectual rigor—a capacious blend of popular science, travel writing and autobiography. There is no discernable limit to Lopez's curiosity: he writes with equal enthusiasm about human origins, the search for the edge of the expanding universe, classical music, arctic archaeology, Impressionist painting and Aboriginal rock art. He is at his best writing about natural history, where his scrupulous research and talent for lucid exposition make the business of scientific fieldwork come alive. The book is rendered with gorgeous prose, and spiked with humor . . . Extraordinary.” — The Wall Street Journal “Lopez writes with transporting precision . . . To travel is to encounter both places and people, and he traverses the psycho-geography as an artful participant/observer. He also confronts the urgent need to address our depredations as a species; he tries to cultivate empathy, compassion, listening carefully. He dispenses history judiciously. Lopez is a master of the big question: Why, for the most part, was it only the white and well-connected who had a seat at the table? The answer is complicated . . . Lopez handles [it] with aplomb.” — The  Christian Science Monitor “A touchstone author whose nonfiction and fiction alike have inspired artists in multiple disciplines . . . Lopez’s visionary descriptions of landscapes are startling in their immediacy. Burgeo