HeyJaredPersonal Landscapes
Ryan Murdock talks with the world’s most original writers, publishers and travelers to get the story behind great books about place. www.personallandscapespodcast.com
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 3
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- Sep 8, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 4, 2026
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Jan Morris with biographer Sara Wheeler (opens the original)
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Jan Morris seemed to live multiple lives. She was a soldier at the end of the Second World War, and a globetrotting journalist with a knack for turning up in the middle of what would become historic events. She was a man — James Morris — and then a woman, undergoing gender-reassignment surgery in Casablanca at the age of forty-six. She hated being called a travel writer but she wrote remarkable books about place, and was one of the finest descriptive writers of her time. She also wrote celebrate
George Forster with biographer Andrea Wulf (opens the original)
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George Forster is the most interesting 18th century explorer that I had never heard of. He traveled the South Pacific on Captain James Cook’s second voyage at age seventeen, sailing through icy waters tantalizingly close to undiscovered Antarctica. The common roots of those languages and cultures led him to develop a theory of Polynesian migration two centuries before it became the scientific consensus. The prevailing European notion at the time was also one of racial superiority, but Forster sa
Rory Maclean on the cross-cultural geography of heaven (opens the original)
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When Rory Maclean’s wife died of cancer at age 55, he set out on a series of journeys that changed his life. His newest book is an examination of grief, a celebration of love, and a cross-cultural exploration of the afterlife. He approached each religion like an an anthropologist, participating in the rituals of living traditions in the hope of reconnecting with the wife he had lost. From the heights of Bhutan to the plains of South Dakota, each journey and meeting opened the door to the next, a
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