Far Away and Long Ago

Hudson was born on the Argentine pampas in 1841 to American settlers and left for England in his thirties, where he became a naturalist and one of the founders of Britain’s bird-protection movement. This memoir, written when he was in his seventies and ill, recovers the first fifteen or so years of that childhood — the open country, the birds, the gauchos and neighbours — in a prose that stays concrete about animals and landscape while the world it describes has already gone.

It is a book about attention rather than achievement, which is an unusual thing to find on a citizenship reading list and probably the reason it is there.

Context: The easiest entry in the Autobiography grouping at Lexile 1000, alongside Helen Keller, Stevenson and Booker T. Washington.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• W. H. Hudson — the author, naturalist and early bird-protection campaigner.