Synopsis
Michael Pollan, writer and gardener, builds himself a writing studio behind his house and chronicles the project in detail--with digressions on Roman architecture, Thoreau, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among other things.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-03-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 320 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 23.2 oz |
Publisher's Note
At a turning point in his life, writer Michael Pollan found himself dreaming of a small wood-frame hut in the woods near his house--a place to work, but also a "shelter for daydreams." Weaving the practical with the philosophical, this book presents a captivating personal inquiry into the art of architecture, the craft of building, and the meaning of modern work. Line drawings throughout. Size C. 320 pp. National ads & publicity. 35,000 print.
Industry Reviews
One of the things that make Mr. Pollan such an attractive writer is the modest way he presents his discoveries. The word 'epiphany' is just a little too large for his tool belt. Building his writing house himself...was bound to lead to revelations of a personal kind. But instead of portentously assessing the gravity of each such moment--making the world stop on its axis, as writers so often do when they stub a toe on the obvious--Mr. Pollan takes what lay hidden a moment before and quietly turns it into an unobtrusive element in the texture of his world. The role he assigns himself here isn't that of buffoon, though slapstick dogs an amateur carpenter, or that of sage, though sagacity abounds in this book. Mr. Pollan takes the role of the self: deliberative, half-amused and tolerant....But the intellectual energy with which 'A Place of My Own' bristles derives mainly from Mr. Pollan's forays into the publications and constructions of the architectural vanguard during the past century."
New York Times Book Review - Verlyn Klinkenborg (03/16/1997)
"...'A Place of My Own' has the humor and lack of pretense which the best American essayists have learned from Twain to value above all things."
Ad. - Janet Malcolm
"...Mr. Pollan Builds His Dream House. It is hardly an original story..., but Pollan tells it well....Pollan's beginner's status serves him well, for he asks the kind of obvious questions about building that most readers will want answered."
New York Review of Books - Witold Rybczynski (05/15/1997)
"Male fantasy is...the real subject of the book. It is the fantasy of escape...into a Thoreau-esque world of essential, nay primeval values, where one can commune with one's essential self and daydream in peace....[I]t is certainly to Pollan's credit that he is trying to write about the more abstract aspect of the need to have a roof over one's head in a readable and engaging way."
Literary Review - Nicola Beauman (07/19/1997)
"An engrossing, charming enterprise..."
Spencer
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