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Michael Pollan is a fine writer and a deep thinker who has made much of his career out of taking on our relationship to the world at a personal level and reporting on it. From the early chapters forward I was aghast that a New Englander in the 1990s would admit to building an uninsulated structure intended for habituation and heating. He did this with gardening in Second Nature: A Gardener's Education and took on agriculture and diet in his highly successful later works, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Pollan leavens his reporting with insights gained from wide reading and consultation with experts and his style is readable and clever.Perhaps my relatively low opinion of the present volume emanates from my own trajectory from a career as a builder to that of a writer, but I found the entire construction project outlined herein to smack of effete elitism. Twenty years earlier as a builder in New Hampshire I didn't know anyone in the trades who would have considered that to be a moral choice as we faced off with the Arabs over oil and the power companies over nuclear reactors. At the conclusion of this tale when Pollan overrides his architect's preference for a wood stove and installs a digitally programmed kerosene heater so the place will be cozy when he walks from his home to his outbuilding office on winter mornings I felt like he had installed an altar to his 19th century oil gods.This book is far more about architectural philosophy than building, so don't buy this if you are hoping for a "how-to." This is much more the story of a rich kid who decides that woodworking would be a nice weekend hobby than a story of how real builders construct our world.
Maybe he should have a place in Obama's cabinet. But I am seeing his writing everywhere. A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur BuilderI read the book A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan. That would be cool. He was in the New Yorker: "To The Farmer Elect." I got an excerpt from the Omnivore's Dilemma this morning on my Delanceyplace.com daily email. This guy is talking and it seems like a lot of people are listening. I loved the book and learned about cabin design, Feng Shui, and how windows can make a wall disappear. I am going to read everything this guy writes.
If you want to see some photos of the author's place so as to get an idea of what he is talking about, don't look in here. There are no pictures in this book which makes it mostly useless.
Wonderful, wonderful book. I am inspired to find some land and build my own little haven. I guess that makes this the most expensive book I've ever bought.
I appreciate my own home more and view other structures with more curiosity as a result of reading this book. I love this book because Michael allowed me to feel I could build a place of my own, and because I experienced the process so thoroughly and vicariously through him, I probably won't. Michael entertains, and makes the process of home-building accessible to any one of us. I loved reading of the balancing of reality and desire, of architect, builder, and setting. I am amazed at what Michael is able to do, and I savor and share his rightful pride in being able to do so. I sit and look at the cover, wanting a little home of my own, and, as I say, I feel satisfied with what he has built, and the creation of my own little nest within a home that is already mine. And if I change my mind, he is here as guide.
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