Far Away and Long Ago

The Argentine Pampas in the 1860s: a boy watches flamingos rise in a crimson cloud, traces the winding paths of armadillos through the grass, and listens to mockingbirds sing in the thorn trees. This is William Henry Hudson's luminous memoir of his childhood on the South American grasslands, where a young naturalist came of age amid a landscape and a way of life that have since vanished entirely. Born to American parents in what was then a lawless frontier south of Buenos Aires, Hudson spent his boyhood in intimate communion with the pampas and its creatures. His observations are rendered with the precision of a trained ornithologist and the sensitivity of a poet who knows he is documenting a vanishing world. The memoir is both a naturalist's record and an elegy for a lost Eden, written with a child's capacity for wonder and an adult's knowledge that such wonders cannot last. It is for readers who love the naturalist writings of Darwin, the lyrical prose of Barry Lopez, and anyone who has ever looked at a landscape and sensed it slipping away.