Macfarlane's glossaries…come from his years of wide-ranging reading and conversation. The result is a beguiling book, and also a very British one—if that isn't too broad a term for a work drawing on Old English, Norn, Anglo-Romani, Cornish, Welsh, Gaelic and the Orcadian, Shetlandic and Doric dialects of Scots…Alternating with the word lists are fine essays on nature writers who have been Macfarlane's companions on a lifetime of literal and literary walking…But for many readers, the wonderfully exotic words will be the thing, even if Macfarlane admits they are sometimes superfluous. "Language is always late for its subject," he writes. "Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, 'Wow.'"

Landmarks, a remarkable book on language and landscape…makes a passionate case for restoring the "literacy of the land," for recalling and setting down the lexicon of the natural world, at a time when it's rapidly disappearing…Mr. Macfarlane embarks on this ambitious task by taking us to the farthest reaches of the British countryside, exploring it with (or in the footsteps of) some of the nature writers he most admires. He picks writers who "use words exactly and exactingly," and that's what he does, too. He's an erudite, lyrical, enthusiastic and exceptionally well-read guide…For a book so self-effacing and respectful of the words of others, Landmarks is wildly ambitious, part outdoor adventure story, part literary criticism, part philosophical disquisition, part linguistic excavation project, part mash note—a celebration of nature, of reading, of writing, of language and of people who love those things as much as the author does. It's an argument for sitting down with a book; it's also an argument for going outside and paying attention…Landmarks feels as if it should be read near a river, in the mountains, in a meadow or on a moor, the wind riffling through your hair, maybe even a gentle rain falling, and no one for miles except a friend to read the best bits aloud to.

In his dynamic new novel, Colson Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad--the loosely interlocking network of black and white activists who helped slaves escape to freedom in the decades before the Civil War--and turns it from a metaphor into an actual train that ferries fugitives northward. The result is a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery.
—The New York Times