Details

ISBN-10: 1789147042
ISBN-13: 9781789147049
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Publish Date: 06/07/2023
Dimensions: 8.00" L, 5.60" W, 1.90" H

Astray: A History of Wandering

Hardcover

Price: $24.00

Overview

A meandering celebration of the indirect and unforeseen path, revealing that to err is not just human–it is everything.

This book explores how, far from being an act limited to deviation from known pathways or desirable plans of action, wandering is an abundant source of meaning–a force as intimately involved in the history of our universe as it will be in the future of our planet. In ancient Australian Aboriginal cosmology, in works about the origins of democracy and surviving disasters in ancient Greece, in Eurasian steppe nomadic culture, in the lifeways of the Roma, in the movements of today’s refugees, and in our attempts to preserve spaces of untracked online freedom, wandering is how creativity and skills of adaptation are preserved in the interests of ongoing life. Astray is an enthralling look at belonging and at notions of alienation and hope.

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Reviews

"With a delinquently hobo eye, Summers-Bremner tracks a winding way through the wayward lives of those of no fixed abode: exiles, fugitives, nomads, the restless, the renegade, the vagrant, and defectors of every kind from settlement. Keeping a wary distance from the longing for belonging, Summers-Bremner shows elatingly how often displacement is, more than a predicament, an alertly styled way of life, and so a vital resource for an uncertain future."

–Steven Connor, professor of English emeritus at the University of Cambridge, author of "The Madness of Knowledge"
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Details

ISBN-10: 1789147042
ISBN-13: 9781789147049
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Publish Date: 06/07/2023
Dimensions: 8.00" L, 5.60" W, 1.90" H
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