2005年NPR美国国家公共电台七月-A 'Field Guide' to Losing and Finding You（在线收听）

This is Day to Day, I am Alex Chadwick.It's time for our weekly book report.We all know you can not judge a book by its cover,but can you judge it by the lack of a subtitle? Book critic David Kipen thinks: Yes, maybe you can.

Almost no publisher takes a non-fiction book to market nowadays without a subtitle any more than a hiker would tackle a Matterhorn without an alpine stock."A field Guide to Getting lost" is Rebecca Solnit's first book to enter the world subtitle free.Perhaps acknowledgement that after 8 volumes of thrillingly venturesome art and nature writing,her name is finally becoming more of a draw than any unwieldy subtitle could ever be.

A field Guide to Getting Lost finds Solnit in a more elliptical mode than we used to from her previous books.Her last book save one was " River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West ", an impressionist biography of a photographer who first proved that all four hooves of a galloping horse really do leave the ground at the same time.Well,unlike that volume , the new book is a quick silver thing,changeable as the western desert that Solnit attends to so closely.It all adds up to this indispensible writer's most personal book yet, alive as ever, to settle new answers of a natural world but newly responsive to the promptings of her own heart and histroy.Yet this is a book about the experience of getting lost in a wild,in emotion in revery,and Solnit would be short changing her subject if she didn't sometimes seem a little lost herself.In its nine related essays,she alternates discursive pieces on childhood,family,friendship and love with a series of recurring meditations keyed to the color of blue.These inter chapters called " The Blue of Distance" offer a kind of base camp,where dazzled but weary travelers can return to prepare for the next descent and Solnit's switchbacks can be astonishing.Here she is pulling off a breath-taking extented metaphor about lost love---"A relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story , a sheltering as a house.You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines.It's a shock to find yourself outdoors and alone again, hard to imagine you could ever live in another house,big where this one was small,small where it was big,hard to imagine building it again but you lit the fire that burned it down yourself".

Solnit is a writer to get lost in, even if sometimes she herself goes too long between looks at a map. The new book, with the subject so slippery, as occasionally it seemed no subject at all, makes greater demands on her readers than her Muybridge buyer. That was Solnit on the rocks with a twist. The new book is Solnit 's stray, no chaser. Some who love the earlier volume may find her new whiskey's kick too strong, too unrelieved.But for those readers who admire the play of solnit's intelligence across any landscape, just the fumes from A Field Guide to getting Lost can disorient you for days.

The book is A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit,David Kipen is book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and for Day to Day.And NPR's summer reading series helps you find the best novels and kids' books and cook books and more and you can find our critics' recommendations as well as some excerpts at NPR.org