Nick Hunt (Walking the Woods and the Water) is on another walking adventure in Outlandish: Walking Europe's Unlikely Landscapes. Cognizant of the rapidly changing climate and the damage that long flights can do to the atmosphere, Hunt decides to try to find the most unlikely climates he can within Europe, close to his home in southern England. He settles on four areas: a patch of Arctic tundra in Scotland, a primeval Polish forest, an arid Spanish desert and the steppes of Hungary. Each of these four areas feels like it belongs elsewhere--perhaps the Amazon, Russia, the American west--but each is a strange little world unto itself within Europe's greener pastures.
Poetic and thoughtful, Hunt spends his time musing on the areas he's visiting and the more worrying climatological changes worldwide. He stops to analyze the history of reindeer in Scotland's Cairngorm mountains, how the Polish language looks almost as forested as the area he's traveling ("the impenetrable thickets of szczys, consonants as dense as an uncut grove"), the influence of Spanish desert on spaghetti westerns and how Hungary's steppes have changed its people--"open spaces often seem to foster closed mentalities, as if the scale turns people's minds inwards to seek shelter."
With insightful lyricism, Hunt does an excellent job of capturing the essences of the vastly different places he's visiting, demonstrating how humans have changed them, and vice versa. Outlandish: Walking Europe's Unlikely Landscapes is part travelogue, part ecological history and thoroughly fascinating. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.