“Scottish Highlands: A Cultural History”
Interlink Books, $15
The Scottish Highlands has been a travel destination for centuries. As far as back as 1773, English literary icon Samuel Johnson, accompanied by friend and future biographer James Boswell, traversed the region, making observations and commenting on its primordial combination of “stone and water.” The scenery, he concluded, “is like a man in rags; the naked skin is still peeping out.” Centuries earlier the Romans called the land Caledonia, Latin for “wooded heights.”
More recently, travel writer Paul Theroux wrote about Highlands’ “elemental” landscape in 1983, after he traveled around the coastline of Britain in his modern classic “The Kingdom by the Sea.” He too was awestruck by the landscape, its wildness and its rawness.
In “Scottish Highlands,” Andrew Beattie offers a cultural history of this most famous part of Scotland by exploring the novels that have been set here, the poems that have been inspired by the landscape and the many travelers who have journeyed there over the centuries. But Beattie also surveys the geographical, social and political history of the Highlands.
He begins with the landscape, one of the most ancient landscapes on the planet. Among geologic features are the Lewisian gneiss, a gray, speckled rock common in northwestern Scotland, that is up to 3 billion years old; the otherworldly rock formation on Skye known as the Quiraing, created by volcanic activity; and the basalt columns on the island of Staffa. He discusses Highland flora (heather and peat) and Highland fauna (red squirrels and red deer) as well as the native cuisine (from whiskey to haggis).
A big chunk of the book is devoted to history, from the coming of the Celts to the arrival of the Picts and the Romans to the rise of the clans to the Highland Clearances, a period when tenant farmers were evicted, or cleared, from their land to make way for more profitable sheep. Also here are such famous, and varied, historical figures as St. Columba of Iona, Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald. A modern-day “hero” is here too: part-time postman Calum MacLeod, who single-handedly built a road on a remote part of the island of Raasay when the government failed to help. A song and a play have been written in his honor. Beattie also writes about the poets (from Robert Burns to Sorley MacLean) and the novelists (Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson) as well as the Highlands in art and music and film and television, from “Local Hero” to the ubiquitous “Braveheart.”
Scottish Highlands is a fine and informed guide to one of the best known, and beloved, destinations in the world.
“French Riviera and Its Artists: Art, Literature, Love, and Life on the Cote d’Azur”
Museyon, $19.95
Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, Monaco, Menton. It’s known as Cote d’Azur, the “sky-blue coast,” an apt description of a region famous for its sunny days and clear waters. As author John Baxter notes, the first artists to explore and depict the French Riviera were Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, followed by Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Pablo Picasso. Marc Chagall arrived later. Eventually the writers came too, none more famous perhaps than F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many of the early travelers came by train, the Blue Train, as it was called. Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Coco Chanel, Somerset Maugham — they all patronized the fashionable Blue Train (an insert features gorgeous vintage railway posters).
The Spanish iconoclast and surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel arrived in the late 1920s to shoot his controversial “L’Age D’Or.” An icon of another sort, Brigitte Bardot, made her cinematic debut in a film shot there, and the Cannes Film Festival became famous as much for its celebrity-studded setting as for its movies.
As with all Museyon guidebooks, the volume is richly illustrated: The back matter alone features an art gallery of the French Riviera and its artists, but paintings are interspersed throughout the book.
Sawyer is a freelance reporter for the Chicago Tribune.
