The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism | 
 enlarge | Author: Geoff Nicholson
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $15.37
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 7897
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1
ISBN: 159448998X
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.51
EAN: 9781594489983
ASIN: 159448998X
Publication Date: November 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A fascinating, definitive, and very personal rumination on the history, science, philosophy, art, and literature of walking, by a skilled cultural commentator.
Geoff Nicholson, author of Bleeding London and Sex Collectors, turns his eye to the intellectual and cultural history of that most common of activitieswalking. This simple, omnipresent activity has inspired numerous subcultures, literary and artistic legacies, sporting events, personal memories, epic journeys, mystical revelations, and scandals.
Its a rich tradition that embraces such novelists as Charles Dickens and Paul Auster, musicians like Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan, and moviemakers from Buster Keaton to Werner Herzog. But its also a tradition that includes obsessives and eccentrics, such as the artist Mudman, who coats his body in mud and then walks the city streets; competitive pedestrians such as Captain Barclay, who walked one mile an hour for a thousand successive hours; and gang members who use the hidden language of the Crip Walk to spell out messages in the dirt with their scuffing. How we walk, where we walk, why we walk announces who and what we are.
Geoff Nicholson is a master chronicler of the hidden subversive twists on a seemingly normal activity. He analyzes the hows, wheres, and whys of walking through the ages. He finds people who walk only at night, or naked, or for thousands of miles at a time, in costume, for causes, or for no reason whatsoever. Here, he brings curiosity and genuine insight to a subject that often walks right past us.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Take an entertaining and insightful walk with Nicholson January 4, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
With a keen and wizened eye for dissecting the world around us, Nicholson draws us into a kaleidoscopic world built on something natural yet ephemeral to all of us. Walking, to Nicholson, is both the puzzle and the answer. He's our guide in an Alice-In-Wonderland-type stroll through human nature, history, cultures and personal lives that leaves us breathlessly climbing the last steep hill with his Mother on her own last journey.
Granted, the title of the book, "The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism" leaves the author little choice but to fall short in writing an encyclopedia of facts, legends, and suppositions that tie into the simple act of self-propelled forward motion. However, he succeeds at drawing out the curiosity and want of self-knowledge in all of us. More to the point, walking is a wonder in and of itself and something worth pondering.
Nicholson writes in a very easy-to-read conversational style that makes you feel you are walking along with him as your mind overflows with ideas and trivia. Much of this is brain-candy such as picturing eccentric characters like Mudman, an artist that performs "art walks" covered in mud and attending Conflux "psychogeographic" events that are all about walking the terrain in New York City. But there are many "Wow!" moments that make up for the excess drift. For example, did you know that filmmaker Werner Herzog, when he heard German star Lotte Eisner was gravely ill and likely to die, walked from Munich to Paris as an act that he believed would somehow will her to live? She lived another 9 years! And, its hard to beat the sardonic wit of Captain Oates of the famous Scott South Pole expedition, when he realized that he had become a frostbitten burden on the crew, and politely took his last walk into an Antarctic blizzard saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time."
I wished this book contained more on the science of walking - from the physiology to the psychology of walking. For better or worse, sports (even walking or hiking) have become a science to study. We certainly know more today about what makes up a quality running performance, for example. Why not walking? There must be far more individuals walking for exercise than running. I think the book's audience would have appreciated more useful information and less trivia. Although, to be fair, I don't believe this is the author's intent. He only briefly approaches walking as a sport or discusses its specific benefits as an exercise. Unlike 100 years ago, when "pedestrianism" was an actual sport, it rarely, if ever, gets attention of any kind today.
Nicholson is at his best when he makes his subject personal. He draws an interesting parallel between walking and writing. Words are like steps. A daunting walk can be compared to writing a daunting manuscript. A walk often takes you to unexpected places and observations. Writing often has its own obstacles, detours and unexpected ideas. Both are forms of exploration that should embrace the unexpected as part of the process.
I confess an interest in the mystery of walking and how a larger population under certain circumstances can embrace it. This intriguing possibility cause me to buy this book as I have been researching the story of the 50-mile Hike Phenomenon which occurred in 1963 during JFK's era. I share Geoff's belief that there is more to walking than we think. It is as an expression of who we are and often who we want to be.
Read this book to gain a new insight to the world around you. Admire Nicholson's passion. He loves and lives his subject. Here is a clarion call to us to remember where we've walked - from our first steps as a baby, to steps in personal victory and then to our final steps. As long as man has been around, walking has been embedded in our lives. We may take walking for granted and even try to replace it with modern conveniences, but it will always be an essential part of what makes us human.
 Reads like a ride in a blender January 2, 2009
I ordered this book sight unseen after reading a favorable review in one of my favorite magazines The Economist. I have always been a huge fan of walking - seeing the world from 5+ feet, moving on at a pace that allows one to engage and disengage at will.
What I ordered this book I hoped to see something on physiology, psychology or philosophy of walking. Instead, this book treats one to a high-speed flow of consciousness - any which thought that flits into the author's mind as he walks goes straight onto the page. The man has an active mind, and the book runs at a pace of a noisy blender.
Now that I had the book in hand, I looked at the dust cover blurbs:
"...demented charm" - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"...not for the faint of heart" - Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.
Wow! When a major reviewer calls a writer demented and the publisher puts that on the back of the book, that is bizzarre, to say the least.
I am sure the author has his audience, and there will be people who'll love this book. Like chewing gum or watching game shows, it will take you away from your life and into another reality. My copy, however, is going right back to amazon.
A delightful ramble through the pedestrian landscape December 29, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Don't look for some great hidden message in Geoff Nicholson's lively and all-encompassing survey of the ways we undertake one of the most fundamental human actions: walking. There isn't one. Instead, this gifted writer, who admits that he goes for walks wherever he finds himself -- Los Angeles, the southwestern desert, London -- to both ward off depression and help him to write, takes his readers on a compelling journey through the world of walkers.
Starting with the nature of the word "walk" itself, and ending with significant journeys of all kinds (from epic walks across Africa and walking on the moon to how Albert Speer kept himself sane during his years in prison by pacing off the distance between Berlin and Heidleberg), Nicholson's book is a joy to read. It is crammed full of the kind of anecdotes and tales that make your eyes open wider (did you know that an avid walker discovered the idea behind Velcro because of his walks?) and sometimes cause you to laugh out loud. He points to his favorite "walking songs" (and notes that Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way' is really about sex, not walking), and his favorite walks in movies (Fred Astaire strolling through Paris in Funny Face makes the grade, for instance.) Street photography and psychogeography come in for their share of attention, too. His knowledge feels encylopaediac, but he never sounds pompous. Rather, the reader ends up feeling Nicholson's urge is to share these tidbits to spread the enjoyment around rather than to show off.
Particularly intriguing is the lost art of competitive pedestrianism, a phenomeonon of the 18th and 19th centuries during which its practitioners undertook such feats as walking one mile an hour (and only one mile each hour) for a thousand straight hours. Nicholson explores these characters and then tries his own 15-hour challenge in the English countryside, despite fearing that his neighbors may summon the police or conclude he is insane.
Ultimately, Nicholson does draw some kind of lesson out of his ruminations on walking; that it is a kind of metaphor for life itself. "There'll be missteps and stumbles, journeys into dead ends; the reluctant retracing of your steps. And you have to tell yourself that's just fine, that it's a necessary and not wholly unenjoyable, part of the process. It's an exploration." But as with any good walk, this unsurprising revelation isn't the point -- it's all about the journey. And Nicholson has taken us on a delightful one.
Overall, one of the best in what I think of as the "Who Knew?" genre, books devoted to quirky subjects that people didn't even know they were interested in until they read them.
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