Four Fields

by Tim Dee

...in four very different parts of the world.

Four Fields

Four Fields is a strange book. I enjoyed reading it, but I'm not quite sure that I ‘got’ it. Stretching our usual idea of what might constitute a field, Tim Dee visits four of them in four very different parts of the world: his local Cambridgeshire fen; a field in Zambia; the prairie near the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana; and a field in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine.

The sections in which Dee describes each of these four ‘fields’ are each, individually, very interesting. But I'm not sure I get how they fit together, or if the book has a central thesis. According to the book's dust-jacket:

[Dee] makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look and think about the way we have messed things up but to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields.

Yes, Dee does indeed write about those things, so I guess that's his thesis.

A book I shall probably read again at some point, as I don't think I really did it justice.

Note: I will receive a small referral fee if you buy this book via one of the above links.
Published

Richard Carter

A fat, bearded chap with a Charles Darwin fixation.

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