Land audiobook

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. - from Chief Sealth’s letter to President Pierce on a treaty giving much of what is now Washington state over for white settlement What are the three most important things in real estate? All together now, “Location, location, location.” Simon Winchester, in his usual way, has offered us a grand tour of land, and thus real estate on our planet. Note the subtitle, How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World). This is not the broker’s walk-through in which the good elements are highlighted while the less appealing aspects are minimized or ignored. It may be that location is the most important property of land, but there are other features that are worth knowing too. Things like How much land is there? How do we know? How was it measured, by whom, and why? Is the amount of land fixed? Can it increase or decrease? Can land be made unusable? Where is everything? Who can make use of it? Is land inherently public, for (reasonable) use by all? Was it ever? How did it come to be private? How do different cultures think about land? Why is land divided up the way it is, into public and private, into parcels of particular size? Who gets to own land, and who is relegated to merely renting it? Winchester has answers. Land is the defining characteristic of every nation. Our (the USA’s) national anthem, for example, goes "O'er the land of the free" not o’er the pond, lake, river or fjord of the free, (and no, Norway's anthem makes no specific mention of fjords), not the sweet air of the free, not the great views of the free (although “spacious skies” and "purple mountain majesties" from our other national anthem, America the Beautiful, comes close), but the land. Check your nation of choice for common ground re this. (Click for a list of anthems) The word "land" figures prominently Although I suggest you check out the Algerian lyrics. Dude, switch to decaf. The war is over.Land is seminal in human culture as well as national history. For many of us in the West, our very origin story begins with a landlord-tenant dispute. “If we owned the garden instead of renting it, Adam, I could have eaten the goddam apple and it would have been nobody’s business but my own. And we wouldn’t have to put up with the creepy landlord spying on us all the time, or his freaky feathered bouncer. The guy should get a hobby, make some friends or something.”Simon Winchester at home in his study in the Berkshires – image from The Berkshire Eagle - Photo: Andrew BlechmanThis is the eighth Winchester I have read, of his fifteen non-fiction books (so, plenty left to get to) and they have all been engaging, informative, and charming. He read Geology at Oxford, so, has a particular soft spot for explaining how physical things on our planet came to be where they are, how they changed over time, and why they exist in the forms they have taken on. You might be interested in the Atlantic Ocean, maybe the Pacific? Winchester has written a book on each. How about looking at the creation of the world’s first geological map, or maybe why Krakatoa blew its top. He is also interested in tracing back how we know what we know, (or, um, history) as a crucial element of understanding things as they are now, and how they came to be. The Perfectionists looks at how industrial standardization developed, and how machine tolerances improved to the point where they are beyond the control of flesh and blood humans. In The Professor and the Madman he looks at how the Oxford English Dictionary was made. The third element in Winchester’s trifecta of interest is people, often odd personalities who played pivotal roles in the development of technical and intellectual advances, thus expanding and deepening human understanding of the world. I think what I’ve done is to get obscure figures from history and tell the stories like I’ve told you about Mister Penck and his maps, Mister Struve and his survey, Mister Radcliffe and his line, and turn them into what they truly are, which is heroic, forgotten figures from history….I just become fascinated by these characters. - from the Kinukinaya interviewThere are plenty of interesting sorts in Land. Maybe none of the folks noted here are quite so interesting as the institutionalized murderer in The Professor and the Madman, but they are still a colorful crew, and it is clear Winchester had fun writing about them. They include Cornelius Lely, who built the 20-mile-long Barrier Dam in The Netherlands, which turned the Zuider Zee into vast tracts of arable land, Gina Rinehart, the world’s largest private landholder, not someone who has contributed nearly so much to the store of human knowledge as she has to conservative politicians, and Friedrich Wilhelm Georg von Struve, who spent forty years measuring a meridian for the tsar of Russia. There are many more, of both the benign and dark variety. When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. -- Desmond Tutu There are surprising connections made, such as the relationship between the invention of barbed wire and America’s appetite for beef. Or the link between the growth of commercial aviation and the development of World Aeronautical Charts, well maybe not so surprising, that. But that such things did not exist prior to people flying the friendly skies reminds us just how recent so much of the foundation of today’s world truly is. I suppose it also might not count as surprising, but John Maynard Keynes had an interesting solution to the problem of landed gentry, euthanasia.Winchester details many of the outrages that have been inflicted, in the name of seizing land, on indigenous people across the planet, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA figuring large in these. But there are also plenty of other people who have been expelled from their homes, livelihoods, and history by the forces of greed across the planet. These include immigrants to the USA whose land was stolen while they were illegally incarcerated, and farmers who were dispossessed by land-owners seeking to maximize the profitability of their holdings, via the Enclosure and Clearance laws passed in England and Scotland. Then there are the perennial turf battles, like those in Ireland and the Middle East.Gripes are, per usual with any Winchester book, minimal. He writes about the role, historical, current, and potential, that trusts have, had, and might have for the preservation of land from destructive exploitation. Yet, in doing so, there was no mention of The Nature Conservancy. Their motto could be (it isn’t) We save land the old-fashioned way. We buy it. It has over a million members (yes, I am) and has protected about 120 million acres of land. It definitely merited a shoutout here. Another part of the book tells of the annihilation of bison from the American west. The critters are referred to as multi-ton. Like the mythical eight hundred pound gorilla which grows only to about 400 pounds at most, bison max out at roughly 2,000 pounds, or a single ton, which still leaves them as the largest land mammal in North America.Like any good geologist, or writer, Simon Winchester enjoys digging. And we are all the lucky recipients of the informational nuggets he unearths. He is a master story-teller, and if you are ever fortunate enough to find yourself at a party with him, or find a chance to see him speak publicly, just pull up a seat and listen. You won’t be sorry. So, I can tell from the looks on your faces that this one would be a perfect fit for you, particularly if you are planning to start a library soon. Do you think you’d like to make an offer on the book? There are other potential buyers stopping by this afternoon, and I would hate for you to miss out. It won’t stay on the shelves very long. Take my card and give me a ring when you make up your mind, ok. But I can assure you that, whether your preferences for land are LaLa, Never, Sugar, Holy, Promised, Wonder, Native, or Rover, when you check out Simon Winchester’s latest book, you will be a Land lover. We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1948) (view spoiler)[I could say that Winchester covered a lot of ground in this book, but really who would write such a thing? I suppose one might say that he planted a flag on his subject matter and claimed it for his own, and if you don’t like it, you can get the hell off his lawn. Not me. Nope. Nosiree. (hide spoiler)]Review first posted – February 5, 2021Publication dates----------January 19, 2021 - hardcover----------January 18, 2022- trade paperback =============================EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pagesA nice overview of Winchester’s professional life can be found hereInterviews-----Kinokuniya USA - Interview with Simon Winchester on 'Land' - video - 30:03 – by Raphael - This is wonderful. The interview is a lot like SW’s books, one fascinating story follows another follows another.-----RNZ - Simon Winchester: how land ownership shaped the modern world by Kim Hill – text extract plus audio interview - 48:24-----The Book Club - Simon Winchester: Land - audio - 42:46Songs/Music-----Woody Guthrie - This Land is Your Land-----The Lion King - This Land----- LaLa Land - soundtrackReviews of other Simon Winchester books we have read:-----2018 - The Perfectionists-----2015 - Pacific-----2010 - Atlantic-----2008 - The Man Who Loved China-----2005 - Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded-----2001 - The Map That Changed the World-----1998 - The Professor and the MadmanItems of Interest – by Winchester-----From 2013 - Simon Winchester at TEDxEast re his book The Men Who United the States – There is an interesting morsel here about 11 minutes in on an important Jeffersonian decision having to do with land ownership-----American Scholar - Experience EverythingItems of Interest----- Citizen Simon: Author, journalist, OBE, sage of Sandisfield by Andrew D. Blechman - Posted on September 9, 2018-----International Map of the World-----The Nature ConservancyAn extra bit. I had intended to incorporate the following into the body of the review, but just felt off about that. Nevertheless I do hold with the notion expressed, so here it is, tucked away at the bottom:I was taken with a particular instance of the horrors that accompanied land grabs in the expanding USA, as having resonance with today, with Donald Trump as the embodiment of that carnage. Whereas the racist yahoos of the 19th century westward expansion delighted in slaughtering bison from a moving train, in order to deny the native residents a living and to make it easier to clear them from desired land, so Trump has spent his time in the limelight, and in power, blasting away at the things that are central to our culture, to our values, so that he could deny us our cultural and legal core, as he seized all he could grab for himself and those like him.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>

'Land' by Simon Winchester is a terrific read! He has pulled together stories and facts about how people claimed possession of land all around the world from the beginning of human history up to the present. The author bought land in 1999 for himself, and he wondered at the psychological impulse for ownership of land. The paperwork of deeds, titles, maps made and plot boundaries explicitly described by local governments, the financial and legal processes for owning land through loans/cash, inheritance - it all started where, and why? His purchase of acres of forested hills led to the author writing this book. Winchester learned his new property had been owned or settled by:-communities of Mohican Indians-communities of Schaghticoke Indians-three Dutch stadholders-English monarchs-the loyalist Philipse family-unknown farmers, hunters and charcoal makers-the Brasher family-a Sicilian immigrant named Vacirca-a German American named Doll-a Sicilian American named Cesare Luria-the author Simon WinchesterThe book tells of astonishing acts of evil done by governments and ordinary people against nonliterate aboriginals. Often the act of claiming land was pure piracy made palatable by the cover of unjust laws and prejudices. When falsehoods or legal mechanisms didn't work, people grabbed land with the open force of superior arms, ships and numbers, using murder and starvation to convince the original inhabitants, along with destroying homes and livestock. Sometimes explorers simply told the local and clearly oblivious aboriginals, after rowing a dinghy to a beach, that the explorer and their sponsoring home governments now owned this island or that country.Almost no developed-world countries are free of colonizing blood. The Netherlands and England were remarkably rapacious and legally inventive in claiming aboriginals' lands, as well as in taking over entire countries already claimed and established by other people - which the author describes. The Dutch also became expert at creating land, making Netherland swamps into modern cities and productive farmland, another remarkable story. England itself changed hands a number of times, from prehistoric people to ancient Romans to Normans. Israel is still being bitterly fought over, which is a very interesting history. New Zealand aboriginals, however, have managed to wrest their lands back from a greedy England, mostly, another interesting chapter in the book.Most aboriginal people believed no one owned land - it was communal property. How did we change from that accepted policy of most of the ancients to the accepted practice of individual or government ownership of property today? Some modern countries declare all of their land is owned by the national government alone, Israel being one of those, apparently, as well as China, North Korea and Russia.Speaking for myself, I wonder if other readers will be as shocked as I was to read the statistics of how a few wealthy individuals actually own most of the land in a democracy like England and Scotland. Scotland has been working at changing this statistic - another fascinating chapter.I was amazed to learn how it was that large areas of land began being professionally surveyed and mapped in order to draw boundaries - it was the early nineteenth century. How it was surveyed blew my mind! Of course, locals have worked out boundaries of property between themselves for millennia, sometimes not without a lot of disputation because of the reliance on verbal history and customary usage.Why are some plots of land unloved? Hello, Chernobyl. But Winchester writes of an astonishing historical event I knew nothing about that was as terrible as Chernobyl. It happened near Denver, Colorado. The Rocky Flats plant processed plutonium for decades, and it did so with the result of long-term land and water pollution despite promises the owners made in how they would put in place safeguards for nearby Denver's land and population. Not. The people in their own nearby Colorado lands and property are still being threatened by possible radiation if they dig more than three feet down!I recommend 'Land' to all readers. It's an important history and very interesting. I thought the book well written, and the author includes only a few in-depth events which illustrate the general milestones of history in owning land. There is a glossary of terms, a Bibliography and an Index.

This book has two parts, the first part is geological and discusses the creation of land and the type of land and the beginning of man to harness it as opposed to just living off what exists. The biggest change to the relationship of man and land is when he began to settle in places and create agriculture which meant staying in one place, to plant and sow.As more people lived together, they began to go from groups to tribes to communities. Communities then began to compete for resources and to conquer others to make their lives easier by exploiting those who were conquered. Little by little different groups began to take land as their gd given rights. Empires were created, and that's when the book changes to a geographic story.Empires began to conquer lands around it to control the output of those lands. The Egyptians would take over more and more land up the Nile Valley to enrich themselves and to enslave peoples to do their work and bidding. Rome took on the Carthaginian Empire to give them control of the Mediterranean Sea and all of the commerce that occurred in that area. Later they expanded into other area that had resources they wanted. This is how land was acquired and controlled.Over the centuries, religion became the primary reason for the controlling of land, as different groups fought to prove that they were gds given. First it was Christianity and the Pagans and then Christianity and Islam, later it was Christianity and Protestantism. As land was controlled by borders and became nations, they again fought over control of resources. In the sixteen hundreds Europe began to go out and begin to control other parts of the world, ending with the division of Africa in the late eighteenth century.World War I and II were fought over control of land as control of land became power and the proof of status as a World Power. After the war, ideology became the primary reason to battle over land for the now reduced resources. During this time, almost all world colonies were given their independence while the world divided by affiliation to the West (US & Europe) and East (Ussr). With the end of the Cold War, we entered a period of armed nationalism.This is the last section where Winchester discussed the current problems with control of land for groups over disputes related to religion and ethnicity, or political disagreements. Some places discussed are the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East and South Asia. It's a well written and research history of why many parts of the world are as they are today.

Best quote from Desmond Tutu "When the missionaries came, they had the Bible and we had the land.They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land."

Firstly, the most important part of any review - I enjoyed the book! So pick it up, have a read, I doubt you’ll regret it.There are a lot of interesting anecdotes and many varied historical episodes are described succinctly. Surely any reader will learn something given the wide range of events covered.However, there is for me a “but”…and it is this; Mr. Winchester at times tends to get preachy on well worn topics without offering the reader any particularly new angles or perspectives. Sometimes it felt more a reflection of the author’s political outlook than a study of the Land as we were promised.

Plenty of interesting stories and some elegant language. Let down a few times by what looks like very light editing—repeated phrases and stories that could have been cut, and a few clunker sentences.

Simon Winchester is one of those nonfiction authors whose books I would buy just because his name is on them. He is always entertaining and informative. At least, that’s been my experience of far.Land is a big subject. The subject of land ownership as a concept is a pretty enormous subject in and of itself. I’ve seen some reviews where this book is criticized for not being comprehensive or academic enough. Thank heaven for that. Being academic enough is great for reference material but it tends to suck as reading-for-pleasure material, which is what I’m always looking for. Also, I can’t even imagine how enormous a book would have to be to comprehensively cover the subject. For me, this book is like the third bowl of porridge for Goldilocks. It’s just right.I love books like this, winding journeys across time, filled with great stories about people, in this case, their attitudes toward land ownership, how it’s impacted their lives and altered the course of history. In this book we get a sense of the past and future of land. It's not as permanent as we might think. What more could you want? Stories well told.I enjoyed this one immensely.

The book “Land. How the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world” is aptly named, for it’s about how mankind’s hunger to own property has shaped the birth of nations and caused many to go to war. I picked up this book because I’ve enjoyed a number of other works by the author, Simon Winchester. This includes his “histories” on the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific ocean. Mr. Winchester is generally able to take a broad range of unrelated facts and compile them into a cohesive and interesting story. “Land” is another great example of this where he has a traveled the globe – from Latvia to where markers exist to measure the world’s longitude, the Netherlands to where land is reclaimed from the sea, the Troubles in Ireland to those in the Holy Land (Israel) and to how the Europeans seized land form the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand and Africa. Interestingly it didn’t tackle land grabs in Asia Pacific such as the Japanese invasions of China and Korea or Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The most important part of the book is the perspective it gives on history. Mankind may hunger for great tracts of land and will beg, borrow and very often steal to get it. But is this really necessary? Just how much land does one person need? And more important why does society allow many to acquire enormous tracts of land that is not used at the expense of those who have little or none? I liked how the author describes the various relationships that people have had towards land – starting with the aboriginal people of countries like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and many African countries where mankind’s relationship with land was not based on ownership but communal use and respect. These concepts were quickly overpowered by land hungry colonists – mainly from Europe – who justified theft claiming that territories were terra nullius or vacant territories and by the Doctrine of Discovery Europeans were legally allowed to claim land that had for generations been managed by indigenous folks. I also liked how there is some movement in the world – in Scotland and in the Trusts of America – to allow more public access to all land. Overall, I enjoyed the book and recommend it.

Non-fiction book about all things "land" - property rights, colonialism, climate change, etc. This is really a pretty hardcore history book if that's not what you're expecting, but it's very comprehensive in topics. Lots of lots of nations stealing & co-opting land from other nations, claiming eminent domain and taking land back from private landowners, public trust lands, how we mistreated Native Americans and a really interesting chapter about the Japanese in California and how we threw them into concentration camps, when really they were the plurality of California farmers before the war.We also create land! Both human-made and nature-made (i.e. volcanic explosions). Humans filled in land to create polders in the Netherlands, the marina district in San Francisco, and lower Manhattan. When you make land, who does it belong to? This book goes into all that. And how weird it is to "own" tracts of land. Like you pass a deed around from human to human in exchange for money, and suddenly you have the right to throw everyone off it as trespassers. At least here in the U.S.! Apparently, "trespassing" is not a thing in some other countries and you are not allowed to throw people off your land.A large array of topics (covering the planet) with a heavy history focus.

An extensive look at how the land surface of our Earth has played the most significant role in shaping our cultural history. Written from a Western point-of-view, the book tells the story of how we humans have used land in many different contexts, for better or for worse. I can't give it 5 stars because of the many surprising grammatical errors which partly ruined the flow of the writing. Also, the author or editors seem to go out of their way in using the most elaborate words in the English language to describe common concepts. This was the first edition, and I hope the errors will be corrected.

Both disturbing and witty, this survey of the history of how human beings think about land is incredibly researched and diverse in focus. While it mostly follows the decidedly rapacious western/white conquest of land, in telling those stories, it provides necessary contrast by telling the perspectives (ignored or manipulated though they were) of the longest residents of the land.I enjoyed that each episode shared the history of a single land-type dispute.

A collection of essays on various topics related to the possession and dispossession of land. Since I have read widely in this area (a fascinating area, I must add), most of the essays came across to me as introductions without much depth, a reminder to me of what I’d read in the past. But some of the essays covered situations and ideas new to me, and they were welcome. Winchester is a good writer who entertains in ways far beyond telling anecdotes. This is a good place to start for those who haven't read about land.In his acknowledgments, Winchester thanks the late Andro Linklater and I join him in highly recommending Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy.

A great collection of how many cultures deal with their relationships with the earth we all inhabit.

An fascinating survey of the idea and practice of land ownership in human society and history. Particularly notable is his very prescient chapter on the Ukraine, which focuses on the collectivization of land under Stalin in the 1930s, and which has reverberated down to the current war there. Highly recommended!