Two Books on Walking
In this post, I would like to review two books about walking, two books that look at this activity from divergent perspectives. The first is entitled In Praise of Walking (The Bodley Head, London, 2019) by Shane O’Mara who is Professor of Experimental Brain Research in Trinity College Dublin , and is a Principal Investigator in, and was the Director of, the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience from 2009-2016. The second book is called The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. (Penguin Books, 2013) by Professor Robert Macfarlane who is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of English in Cambridge . He is well-known as a writer about nature, climate, landscape, people and place, and whose Mountains of the Mind (2003) I have already reviewed in these pages. The first describes the activity of walking from a scientific, physical, neurological and psychological point of view while the second is a literary and poetic investigation of what it...