Landscape and memory
When we look at a landscape, do we see nature or culture? That question lies at the heart of this book. The author believes that every landscape, forest, river, or mountain, is a work of the mind, a repository of the memories and obsessions of the people who gaze upon it. In this work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art, he ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore.