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Shop nowMountains of the Mind
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We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreThe basis for the new documentary film, Mountain: A Breathtaking Voyage into the Extreme.
Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert Macfarlane reveals how the mystery of the world's highest places has come to grip the Western imagination—and perennially draws legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes.
His story begins three centuries ago, when mountains were feared as the forbidding abodes of dragons and other mysterious beasts. In the mid-1700s the attentions of both science and poetry sparked a passion for mountains; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lord Byron extolled the sublime experiences to be had on high; and by 1924 the death on Mount Everest of an Englishman named George Mallory came to symbolize the heroic ideals of his day. Macfarlane also reflects on fear, risk, and the shattering beauty of ice and snow, the competition and contemplation of the climb, and the strange alternate reality of high altitude, magically enveloping us in the allure of mountains at every level.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of bestselling, prizewinning books about nature, place, and people, including Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and (with Jackie Morris) The Lost Words. In 2017 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Cambridge University.
James A. Gillies has been a familiar voice across BBC television and radio for nearly a quarter of a century. He has worked as an actor, continuity announcer, program narrator, and newsreader, even reading the Shipping Forecast. Trained at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in the 1970s, he taught speech and drama and theater studies for much of the next decade, developing many of the country's first school examinations in the subject. Finding himself in demand as a professional voice actor along the way, he was recruited by the BBC in the early 1990s. In 2013, he left in order to concentrate on his favorite part of the job: performance and, in particular, storytelling. Since then he has been in demand worldwide, recording generally one audiobook per month, voicing television ads in the U.K., U.S., Russia, Scandinavia, and the Middle East, and providing voice tracks for television, film, gaming, and on Ulineprojects. James lives with his wife, a former orchestral violist turned book editor, and two Norwegian Forest cats in the picturesque old weaving village of Kilbarchan in the beautiful West of Scotland.