Far Away and Long Ago
Hudson remembers a childhood on the Argentine pampas: birds, snakes, horses, the seasons and the slow disappearance of a way of life. He was born in 1841 to American parents, and the book is one of the finest accounts we have of a naturalist's mind being formed by a place.
The chapters are organised by subject rather than chronology, and the writing is unhurried. Hudson is interested in what children actually notice, and he is honest about fear and cruelty as well as wonder. It is a memoir that reads like a nature book, and a nature book that reads like a memoir.
Public-domain status
First published in 1918. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; W. H. Hudson died in 1922, so this work has been free to republish there since 1993.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 6093 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
- The Purple Land — W. H. Hudson, 1885
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851
- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847
- Buenos Aires — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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