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 enlarge | Author: Bruce Chatwin
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $1.00
You Save: $14.00 (93%)
New (35) Used (141) Collectible (3) from $1.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  54 reviews
Sales Rank: 26206
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0140094296
Dewey Decimal Number: 919.40463
EAN: 9780140094299
ASIN: 0140094296
Publication Date: June 1, 1988
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Read before you go! October 2, 2005
2 out of 11 found this review helpful
I wish I had read this book prior to our traveling to Australia.
It would have added more value to our already wonderful trip.
 Disappointing... September 30, 2005
2 out of 18 found this review helpful
I read it because some people recommended it to me as "the father of travel writing". However, it's not been a page-turner to me...
Solvitur ambulando July 30, 2005
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Nominally a book recounting the time Chatwin spent with the Australian Aboriginal tribes of Alice Springs, The Songlines in reality weaves together travel writing, history, and literary quotations to become a larger project about nomadism and evolution. It is as though what he found in Australia startled him into crystalizing a lifetime worth of disparate thoughts. More than classic travel writing or essay form, The Songlines captures the struggle to put this overarching thesis into words.
The struggle of the Aborigines to preserve their traditional form of worship against disinterest, hostility and monied patronization is one of the central contemporary aspects of the book. Additionally, Chatwin draws from sources as disparate as Konrad Lorenz, religious myth, and Herman Melville to construct his arguments.
I found Songlines largely successful. As someone who once walked from Holland to Spain I have a soft spot for discourse about the philosophy of walking. I also greatly admire Chatwin as a writer, so did not have any expectations that this would be a "normal" travel book. I strongly suspect that the method he uses (journal fragments and quotations interspersed throughout) may not work for many readers and it ultimately might have been stronger had he found a more integrated narrative form.
In short, this should be a very strong read if you are interested in the ideas at the center of the work. If you have read this far in the review it probably goes without saying that this is not the book for a typical travel essay about life in the Australian bush. Look elsewhere if that is what you are trying to find. I find it an excellent addition to the Chatwin body of work-- a body of work that is far too small as a result of his untimely death in 1989.
An Experience of the Sacred July 19, 2005
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Bruce Chatwin takes the reader on a delightful journey across cultures and through time and space as he looks at issues of creation, history, tradition, and the sacred. His "real time" journeys are delightfully laced with story telling, philosophical pondering and reflection, and humor. His reverence for life and indigineous people is clear. Songlines are sacred for the aborigines - and the book itself draws the reader into an experience of the sacred.
Chatwin's Novel Blends Anthropology and Philosophy May 20, 2005
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Chatwin's Songlines investigates the essence of humanity's interactions and impulses in a accessible, storytelling prose. Chatwin has no difficulty in using the roots of the Aborigine culture as a stage to incorporate his far reaching notes and theories on the human species' instinctual needs. The concept that humans act with primordal instincts establishes the foundation for Chatwin's thesis that the interactions and social structures of nomadic or less civilized societies can indicate the needs people have for movement, defensive social agreements (companionship)for survival, and self recognition through knowledge of one's surroundings.
Chatwin builds upon his discriptions of the Aboriginal culture with memoirs from his other interactions with different cultures to develop a universal message about the human condition. He further punctuates his message with anecdotes and notes that can be a slight nuisance to read while attempting to finish the story, but add fascinating background information and perspective from many of Chatwin's most influential sources.
The Songlines is aproximately 300 pages, but is such a stimulating read it can be finished in only two or three sittings and easily within a week.
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