Review by New York Times Review
Geoff Nicholson leads readers down the path of pedestrianism, with ample opportunity for diversion. IF golf is a good walk spoiled, then walking is a great game made dull. How sluggish locomotion is, compared with the speed at which the mind absorbs new images and information. The brain strains at the body's tether, seethes for new scenery, new stimulation, bridles at the slow feet below. Look at that tree with such lovely orange leaves, how pretty it is. ... A minute later: the same tree, the same leaves, still good looking. Walking is adding with an abacus, it's space travel on a donkey. All the same, many people do it, and clearly Geoff Nicholson, the British author of "The Lost Art of Walking," is among them. "I've strolled and wandered, pottered and tottered, dawdled and shuffled, mooched and sauntered and meandered," he brags at the beginning of this pleasant tour of the literature and lore of ambulation. "I've certainly ambled and I could be said to have rambled. ... I've also shambled, but I don't think I've ever gamboled." It turns out that the highly prolific Nicholson also composes novels on his feet. It's how he keeps his productivity up. He solves plot twists and problems of characterization as he walks. One supposes that at some point, strolling along in the Hollywood Hills, the neighborhood in Los Angeles where he lives part of the year, Nicholson, with more than a dozen books to his credit, asked himself how he had overlooked writing about something so central to his life. Could he do it? Did he have the qualifications? "The overriding one was that I liked walking: I liked it a lot," he answered himself, feet pounding the canyon asphalt, and set to work A disclaimer: I can't walk, at least not easily. I have a condition that makes it painful to do so. Nicholson writes of the pleasurable self-annihilation to be found in a purposeful stride, and another noted writer, the British novelist Iain Sinclair, tells him that "as well as hoovering up information," walking is "a way of actually shifting a state of consciousness, and you get into things you didn't know about, or you begin to find out about, and that's the interesting part." But I think only of hyperextended knees, strained lower backs and concussed heels. In fact, the part of "The Lost Art of Walking" with which I most easily identify is the book's opening, when Nicholson takes a spill on an ordinary hill and breaks his arm in three places. My heart felt not joy, to be sure, but at least the same soft oomph one experiences when Icarus falls into the sea. We were designed to move on all fours, at best knuckle-walk. Nicholson's wipeout put him on the sidelines at an inopportune moment for this book. That may be why in "The Lost Art of Walking" he is not often on the road. This is not a travel book so much as an omnium-gatherum for those who like to ride what was once called "the marrow bone coach." It is perfect for the armchair walker. Nicholson's stance is that of the ordinary man on the street, fortified by his commonsense Englishness. For instance, the Continent has recently given us the science of psychogeography, which its founder, Guy Debord, described as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." "This is fine as far as it goes," Nicholson notes, "but it doesn't go very far." Nor is Nicholson crazy about the necromantic effusions that are common among New Agers when they walk. "Personally I blame Thoreau for a lot of this," he writes. For his part, Nicholson is just as happy in a parking lot as at Big Sur. A walk is a walk. It is "something but not much, certainly not a means of salvation." It can be made even better by a drink or two, as Nicholson shows when he wanders around Manhattan, trying, in a doff of the hat to psychogeography, to figure out whether certain streets in the Village outline a martini glass. The loping pace of this book, comparable to the act of walking itself, invites time for trivia, and there is a lot in these pages. Nicholson's previous books, among them "Sex Collectors," reveal a taste for offbeat information, and the nuggets collected here must have taken him some work to unearth. According to Nicholson: Wordsworth walked more than 180,000 miles in his life; Norwegians have more than 50 words for walking; roughly 40 percent of pedestrians killed in car accidents are drunk. Private security guards keep what is called the Hollywood Entertainment District Public Urination Map to record instances of this unlawful act. Erik Satie liked to write his music while walking. "Before I compose a piece," he once said, "I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself." World War I hurt his productivity, because he could not write down his ideas under the blacked-out streetlamps of Paris. Mrs. Dalloway could have covered the distance in the famous walk in the eponymous novel in the time frame the book allows only by taking a taxi. There was a man who twice walked naked across England, from one corner to the other. In 1974, Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris because he believed it would cure the film historian Lotte Eisner, who was gravely ill. After his arrival she lived another nine years. WALKING turns out to have had a heyday, at least as a competitive sport. That heyday came in the 19th century, when for the first time it was no longer something nearly everyone had to do. The sport was called pedestrianism, which was not then, Nicholson says, a synonym for the act of walking as it is now. Pedestrians walked on bets, they walked to set records, they walked for love. On a bet, the great pedestrian Capt. Robert Barclay Allardice walked a mile in each of a thousand successive hours, which means, as Nicholson points out, that he never got to rest for more than an hour and a half at a stretch for more than 40 days. One of Nicholson's favorite walkers, though, trod his path more recently. The explorer Sebastian Snow walked the 8,700 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Panama Canal in 19 months in the early 1970s. Snow, who died in 2001, was "droll, debonair, tough as granite and an eccentric by any conventional standard," Nicholson writes. Asked how he did it, the Old Etonian commented: "By some transcendental process, I seemed to take on the characteristics of a Shire (horse), my head lowered, resolute, I just plunked one foot in front of t'other, mentally munching nothingness." Which is why I'd rather ride a bike or grab a cab. Mrs. Dalloway would have needed a taxi to cover the distance of her famous walk in the time the novel allows. D.T. Max is the author of "The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery," recently published in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Nicholson has written one of those charming titles that meanders in and out of history, geography, philosophy, and all manner of literary references in the way of Sarah Vowell and Roger Deakin. He makes it all seem so effortless that it is only later, after completing his invaluable walking bibliography, that readers will grasp how well-read he is. As Nicholson writes about his own experiences walking in Los Angeles, New York, London, and other less populated locales, he threads in observations about Raymond Chandler, Bruce Chatwin, Virginia Woolf, Paul Auster, and an entire host of singers and songwriters. Psychogeography is defined and discussed along with urban blight and renewal, the nature of cities, and the difference between labyrinths and mazes. Nicholson flows readily from one subject to the next, carrying readers along on a smart and entertaining exploration of both physical action and cultural inquiry. From prisoners seeking peace, to a Ray Bradbury short story, to the big myth of Mao's Long March, the world is at Nicholson's fingertips and feet.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Setting foot in a street makes it yours in a way that driving down it never does," says Nicholson (Sex Collectors), and mundane though walking may be, Nicholson tells us in this leisurely, charmingly obsessive literary stroll, pedestrianism is not without drama, from pratfalls like the one in which he broke his arm on an innocuous Hollywood Hills street to getting lost in the desert of western Australia. Walks, he reminds us, have inspired writers from Thoreau and Emerson to Dickens and Joyce, as well as musicians from Fats Domino to Aerosmith. Nicholson guides readers from the streets of L.A.--where walkers are invariably regarded with suspicion--to New York City and London. He considers the history of "eccentric" walkers like the "competitive pedestrian" Capt. Robert Barclay Allardice, whose early 19th-century walking feats gave him the reputation of a show-off. From street photographers to "perfect" walks--the first at the Poles, the first on the moon--and walks that never happened, Nicholson's genial exploration of this "most ordinary, ubiquitous activity" is lively and entertaining. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Prolific author and novelist Nicholson (The Food Chain) has penned an engaging and entertaining treatise on walking. Chapters include amusing descriptions of walks through cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and London and musings about professional and nonprofessional walkers past and present, walking through nature, street photographers and their craft, and the long walk home or away from home. Nicholson's witty style and distinct way of describing an ordinary activity make this a thoroughly enjoyable read. While by no means exhaustive, Nicholson does himself tread a lot of ground; readers may find the ultimate effect is that they are inspired to put the book down for a nice long walk with a newfound way of observing the scenery. In the author's words, "it confirmed for me what I'd known all along, that walking isn't much good as a theoretical experience." The book includes a bibliography, but there aren't references for many of the intriguing tidbits he includes, which may disappoint academics and serious readers. Recommended for public libraries and sociology collections.--Mary Grace Flaherty, Ph.D. candidate, Syracuse Univ., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
