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JA Baker

As seen in: Five Books
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Articles by JA Baker

The Best Books on Wild Places

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By Barry Lopez, Cormac McCarthy, JA Baker, Nan Shepherd
| Five Books
You have recommended five books for us about wild landscapes. What would you say are the characteristics of great landscape writing? Precision and particularity, combined with an appeal to the universal. The very best books are often those that look the most closely but think most broadly. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is only – apparently – about the Cairngorms, a single mountain group in north-east Scotland. But actually, it’s about the relationship between the human mind and place.
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Five Books: Robert Macfarlane recommends the best books on Wild Places

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By Barry Lopez, Cormac McCarthy, Nan Shepherd, JA Baker
| Five Books
You have recommended five books for us about wild landscapes. What would you say are the characteristics of great landscape writing? Precision and particularity, combined with an appeal to the universal. The very best books are often those that look the most closely but think most broadly. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is only – apparently – about the Cairngorms, a single mountain group in north-east Scotland. But actually, it’s about the relationship between the human mind and place.
Open in Who Shared Issue with article?

The best books on Birdwatching

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By JA Baker, Mark Cocker, Richard Mabey
| Five Books
You’ve chosen birdwatching books for us. To start off, I asked if you could recommend a book that really captures the atmosphere and the magic of birdwatching – that gives a sense of what it is about it that gets people so addicted. You chose J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine. Why? This book caught my imagination when I first read it, which was in the late 1960s. It’s a book about one man’s obsession with a particular bird.
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