David Gange – författare

COLLECTIVE WINNER OF THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE ‘This is the book that has been wanting to be written for decades: the ragged fringe of Britain as a laboratory for the human spirit’ Adam Nicolson Over the course of a year, leading historian and nature writer David Gange kayaked the weather-ravaged coasts of Atlantic Britain and Ireland from north to south: every cove, sound, inlet, island.The idea was to travel slowly and close to the water: in touch with both the natural world and the histories of communities on Atlantic coastlines. The story of his journey is one of staggering adventure, range and beauty. For too long, Gange argues, the significance of coasts has been underestimated, and the potential of small boats as tools to make sense of these histories rarely explored. This book seeks to put that imbalance right.Paddling alone in sun and storms, among dozens of whales and countless seabirds, Gange and his kayak travelled through a Shetland summer, Scottish winter and Irish spring before reaching Wales and Cornwall. Sitting low in the water, as did millions in eras when coasts were the main arteries of trade and communication, Gange describes, in captivating prose and loving detail, the experiences of kayaking, coastal living and historical discovery.Drawing on the archives of islands and coastal towns, as well as their vast poetic literatures in many languages, he shows that the neglected histories of these stunning regions are of real importance in understanding both the past and future of the whole archipelago. It is a history of Britain and Ireland like no other.

'Prose that is precise and beautiful as northern light … this book is an absolute delight' MOYA CANNON Join David Gange on a seabound journey along Atlantic coasts and islands, exploring places and ways of life that have been built on small rowed or paddled boats. These small boats outnumber decked ships by at least fifty to one. Yet almost all history writing is about big boats. This is a strange misrepresentation of maritime history that this book seeks to put right. From Ireland and Shetland to the Faroes and across to Greenland, Newfoundland, the US and the Caribbean, Árdras is the story of eight journeys in search of ocean-going rowed and paddled boats.Gange, an award-winning historian, joins community pilgrimages to tiny islands on their saints’ days, and races and regattas that express revivals of commitment to local boats and the community ideals they sustained. Along the way he encounters whales, sharks and icebergs – as well as journeys beneath skies filled, from horizon to horizon, with tens of thousands of seabirds.Small traditional boats fulfil roles in their communities unlike any other supposedly inanimate things. Often treated as living members of the family, with minds and lives of their own, they’ve been essential to many cultures’ ways of living with the seascapes that surround them. This gorgeous and lyrical book offers not only a journey into the past, but a vision of how these ways of life might inform our futures.

From Ireland and the Shetlands up to Greenland, across to Baffin Island, Newfoundland, the US, and the Caribbean – prize-winning author David Gange embarks on a seabound journey through North-Atlantic coasts & islands, exploring ways of life that have been built on small rowed or paddled boats. A true and verified story, Afloat also offers a vision of how those ways of life might inform all our futures.Small traditional boats fulfil roles in their communities unlike any other supposedly inanimate things. Often treated as living members of the family, with minds and lives of their own, they’ve been essential to many cultures’ ways of living in the land- and seascapes that surround them.Wherever we have statistics, small rowed and paddled boats outnumber decked ships by at least fifty to one. Yet almost all history writing is about the big boats, a strange misrepresentation of maritime history. And one this book puts right.Afloat is the story of eight journeys in search of ocean-going rowed and paddled boats, beautifully illustrated with photographs taken by the author. Gange kayaks thousands of miles, and spends hundreds of miles in wooden, canvas, and birch-bark boats, dozens of nights sleeping at the shoreline, and weeks in boat builders’ workshops learning, with saw or plane in hand, the songs and stories of these charismatic vessels. He joins community pilgrimages to tiny islands on their saint’s days, and races and regattas that express revivals of commitment to local boats and the community ideals they sustained. Along the way he encounters whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles and icebergs, as well as journeys beneath skies filled, from horizon to horizon, with tens of thousands of seabirds. Most of all, though, these journeys involve learning from the worldviews of small communities who have suffered intensely from the nation- and empire-building of modern states, but whose knowledge and ethics are far more important for the future than those of the inland bureaucracies that marginalised them.

Almost every great figure in nineteenth-century Britain, from Thomas Carlyle to William Gladstone to Charles Darwin, read histories of ancient Egypt and argued about their content. Egypt became a focal point in disputes over the nature of human origins, the patterns underlying human history, the status and purpose of the Bible, and the cultural role of the classics. Egyptian archaeology ingrained its influence everywhere from the lecture halls of the ancient universities to the devotional aids of rural Sunday schools, and the plots of sensation fiction. Dialogues with the Dead shows, for the first time, how Egyptology's development over the century that followed the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script in 1822 can be understood only through its intimate entanglement with the historical, scientific, and religious contentions which defined the era.

The history of archaeology is generally told as the making of a secular discipline. In nineteenth-century Britain, however, archaeology was enmeshed with questions of biblical authority and so with religious as well as narrowly scholarly concerns. In unearthing the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, travellers, archaeologists and their popularisers transformed thinking on the truth of Christianity and its place in modern cities. This happened at a time when anxieties over the unprecedented rate of urbanisation in Britain coincided with critical challenges to biblical truth. In this context, cities from Jerusalem to Rome became contested models for the adaptation of Christianity to modern urban life. Using sites from across the biblical world, this book evokes the appeal of the ancient city to diverse groups of British Protestants in their arguments with one another and with their secular and Catholic rivals about the vitality of their faith in urban Britain.

The history of archaeology is generally told as the making of a secular discipline. In nineteenth-century Britain, however, archaeology was enmeshed with questions of biblical authority and so with religious as well as narrowly scholarly concerns. In unearthing the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, travellers, archaeologists and their popularisers transformed thinking on the truth of Christianity and its place in modern cities. This happened at a time when anxieties over the unprecedented rate of urbanisation in Britain coincided with critical challenges to biblical truth. In this context, cities from Jerusalem to Rome became contested models for the adaptation of Christianity to modern urban life. Using sites from across the biblical world, this book evokes the appeal of the ancient city to diverse groups of British Protestants in their arguments with one another and with their secular and Catholic rivals about the vitality of their faith in urban Britain.