Lands of Lost Borders
$29.95| ISBN-13: | 9780345816771 | Format: | Hardcover |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subject: | Hard Cover Non-Fiction | Publisher: | Knopf Random Vintage Canada |
| Published: | January 30th 2018 | Pages: | 320 |
Book Description
"Every day on a bike trip is like the one before--but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile."
As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved--that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher--had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars.
To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end.
Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.
About the Author
Kate Harris has written for The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, and The Georgia Review, among other publications. A Rhodes scholar and Morehead-Cain scholar, she was named one of Canada's top modern-day explorers and has won several awards for her nonfiction writing. She lives off-grid in a log cabin in Atlin, British Columbia. Lands of Lost Borders is her first book.