A Magazine Best Books of the Year. In award-winning author Simon Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art, as encyclopedic as and as irresistibly readable as Schama's own . "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."— "Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."—