Books in the American Land & Life Series series

What connections can be drawn between oral history and the shopping mall? Gospel music and the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant? William Carlos Williams's Paterson and the Manhattan Project's secret cities? The answers lie in this insightful collection of essays that read and illuminate the American landscape. Through literature and folklore, music and oral history, autobiography, architecture, and photography, eleven leading writers and thinkers explore the dialectic between space and place in modern American life. The result is an eloquent and provocative reminder of the environmental context of events - the deceptively simple fact that events "take place".

The river, like a keen memory, carries a record of the past. The author has spent forty years in the basin of the Upper Iowa River. In this book, he tells the story of the Upper Iowa as it flows through land and people, holding true to Aldo Leopold's conception of land as a community in which water, people, and soil play interactive parts.

In the hot summer of 2004, the author floated away from the routine of daily life just as Henry David Thoreau and his brother had done in their own small boat in 1839. This first-person narrative uses his ecological way of looking, of going deep rather than far, to show that our outward journeys are inseparable from our inward ones.

The contributors to this work address how the environmentalist Henry David Thoreau and his successors attempted to cope with the epistemological split between the perceiver and place inherent in writing about nature. They discuss the kinds of discourse most effective for writing about place.

Travelling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent Ryden - himself a most careful listener and reader - asks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings?