From the National Book Award-winning author of the now-classic Arctic Dreams, a vivid, poetic, capacious work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters—human, animal, and natural—that have shaped an extraordinary life.Taking us nearly from pole to pole—from modern megacities to some of the most remote regions on the earth—and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez, hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as "one of our finest writers," gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that moves indelibly, immersively, through his 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. As he takes us on these myriad travels, Lopez also probes the long history of humanity's quests and explorations, including the prehistoric...