Michael Pollan's unmatched ability to draw lines of connection between our everyday experiences- whether eating, gardening, or building-and the natural world has been the basis for the popular success of his many works of nonfiction, including the genre-defining bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. With this updated edition of his earlier book A Place of My Own, readers can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan's realization of a room of his own-a small, wooden hut, his "shelter for daydreams"-built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A glorious piece of prose . . . Pollan leads readers on his adventure with humor and grace."
-Chicago Tribune
"A captivating and informative adventure."
-John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
"An utterly terrific book . . . an inspired meditation on the complex relationship between space, the human body, and the human spirit."
-Francine du Plessix Gray
-Chicago Tribune
"A captivating and informative adventure."
-John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
"An utterly terrific book . . . an inspired meditation on the complex relationship between space, the human body, and the human spirit."
-Francine du Plessix Gray
From the Inside Flap
"A room of one's own: is there anybody who hasn't at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn't turned those soft words over until they'd assumed a habitable shape?"
When writer Michael Pollan decided to plant a garden, the result was an award-winning treatise on the borders between nature and contemporary life, the acclaimed bestseller Second Nature. Now Pollan turns his sharp insight to the craft of building, as he recounts the process of designing and constructing a small one-room structure on his rural Connecticut property--a place in which he hoped to read, write and daydream, built with his two own unhandy hands.
Invoking the titans of architecture, literature and philosophy, from Vitrivius to Thoreau, from the Chinese masters of feng shui to the revolutionary Frank Lloyd Wright, Pollan brilliantly chronicles a realm of blueprints, joints and trusses as he peers into the ephemeral nature of "houseness" itself. From the spark of an idea to the search for a perfect site to the raising of a ridgepole, Pollan revels in the infinitely detailed, complex process of creating a finished structure. At once superbly written, informative and enormously entertaining, A Place of My Own is for anyone who has ever wondered how the walls around us take shape--and how we might shape them ourselves.
A Place of My Own recounts his two-and-a-half-year journey of discovery in an absorbing narrative that deftly weaves the day-to-day work of design and building--from siting to blueprint, from the pouring of foundations to finish carpentry--with reflections on everything form the power of place to shape our lives to the question of what constitutes "real work" in a technological society.
A book about craft that is itself beautifully crafted, linking the world of the body and material things with the realm of mind, heart, and spirit, A Place of My Own has received extraordinary praise: -->
From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
When writer Michael Pollan decided to plant a garden, the result was an award-winning treatise on the borders between nature and contemporary life, the acclaimed bestseller Second Nature. Now Pollan turns his sharp insight to the craft of building, as he recounts the process of designing and constructing a small one-room structure on his rural Connecticut property--a place in which he hoped to read, write and daydream, built with his two own unhandy hands.
Invoking the titans of architecture, literature and philosophy, from Vitrivius to Thoreau, from the Chinese masters of feng shui to the revolutionary Frank Lloyd Wright, Pollan brilliantly chronicles a realm of blueprints, joints and trusses as he peers into the ephemeral nature of "houseness" itself. From the spark of an idea to the search for a perfect site to the raising of a ridgepole, Pollan revels in the infinitely detailed, complex process of creating a finished structure. At once superbly written, informative and enormously entertaining, A Place of My Own is for anyone who has ever wondered how the walls around us take shape--and how we might shape them ourselves.
A Place of My Own recounts his two-and-a-half-year journey of discovery in an absorbing narrative that deftly weaves the day-to-day work of design and building--from siting to blueprint, from the pouring of foundations to finish carpentry--with reflections on everything form the power of place to shape our lives to the question of what constitutes "real work" in a technological society.
A book about craft that is itself beautifully crafted, linking the world of the body and material things with the realm of mind, heart, and spirit, A Place of My Own has received extraordinary praise: -->
From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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More About the Author
Michael Pollan is the author of five books: Second Nature, A Place of My Own, The Botany of Desire, which received the Borders Original Voices Award for the best nonfiction work of 2001 and was recognized as a best book of the year by the American Booksellers Association and Amazon, and the national bestsellers, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense of Food. A longtime contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. His writing on food and agriculture has won numerous awards, including the Reuters/World Conservation Union Global Award in Environmental Journalism, the James Beard Award, and the Genesis Award from the American Humane Association.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
83 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
looking at building from all angles,
This review is from: A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams (Mass Market Paperback)
I'm so glad this book is once again readily available; I keep wanting to give it to friends and it had become hard to find. Pollan undertook the project of building himself a modest shelter, and used that as a jumping-off place to consider--always entertainingly--a dazzling array of related subjects. The book is a joy to read, a disquisition on everything from design considerations (site, view, feel), to descriptions of the nitty-gritty of basic shelter construction (why you don't see windows that swing inward, the right way to hammer a nail), to reflections about historical, cultural and technological influences on the evolution of structures, the divergence between design and construction that produced the profession of architect and the craft of builder and the tension between the two. Pollan's graceful writing is informed by his inquiring intellect and his wide-ranging fund of knowledge. There is something thought-provoking on nearly every page.
57 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An intimate tour of a writer's most sacred place: the house of their dreams,
By
This review is from: A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams (Mass Market Paperback)
I was astonished to see that there are *any* less than stellar reviews for this book, so let me speak in defense of Michael Pollan's sophomore effort: You Must Read This Book!
For those who loved The Omnivore's Dilemma, this book describes the process by which the cradle of that great work was itself brought to life. As a person married to an author, and as a person who himself writes more than the average American, Pollan's process of articulating his own dreams (and fears) for his own writing house literally brought tears to my eyes, so profound his subject and so universal its truths. It is a brilliant synthesis of abstract and concrete--the construction of a physical space *so that* greater mental heights can be imagined and obtained. For those who celebrate the way that Pollan has helped us restore some measure of our own humanity by helping us reconnect with what is true about food (and by learning how to avoid what is false about edible food-like substances), let only those who are truly roofless cast the first stone against this book! For the rest of us, whether we own, rent, or live more transiently in some sheltering construct, this book teaches the truly multi-dimensional ways that dwellings come to be, and how the manifold relationships that condense into built forms continue to express those relationships, even to those who are not yet born. For those who love Pollan's ways with words, this book is full of fridge-worthy sentences and page-worthy paragraphs. For those who enjoyed meeting Joel Salatin in "Part III: Grass" of the Omnivore's Dilemma, in this book we meet the prototype from the building trade, Joe Benney. Indeed, I'd be willing to bet that without Joe's training in the manual arts, Michael would never have made it past the first handshake with Mr. Salatin of Polyface farms. For those who complain "this book is nothing new", fooey. Yes it was first published more than a decade ago, but as a book I had not read, it was new to me. The new paperback format is far more friendly to me and my traveling lifestyle. And the new preface provides an opportunity for Pollan to complete some factual and cultural arcs that were anticipated by the foundations he laid in 1997. (In that way, every finished building is really the start of a new, unimagined next building.) So...I loved it, and I suspect that if you have ever dreamed about building a place for your own dreams, you will love it, too!
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful,
By Raph84 "eXtreme reader" (South West, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams (Mass Market Paperback)
I picked up this book after reading Omnivore's Dilemma. This book is the Omnivore's Dilemma for architecture and building. I found it to give a fantastic overview of the history of architecture, the difficulties in translating the architect's plans into something realistic (paring things down to form over function), and the realities of making a structure from the ground up.
This book however is not a manual of how to build. If you are interested in building or creating things out of scratch it will be very happy with this book. This might better be titled the philosophy of building.... a place of one's own.
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