Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity

by Mary Gordon

Book Overview

Mary Gordon, bestselling author of Spending and The Shadow Man, investigates the role that place plays in the formation of identity -- the connections between how we experience place and how we become... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684862549
• ISBN13: 9780684862545
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

A comfortable read that stirs memories

If you've ever longed to return to a place from your past, Mary Gordon gently explores why. With memories that are sometimes sad, she connects how place figures into who we love and how we make decisions later on in life. Her chapters are houses that serve as an eclectic garden tour, and which, in the end, make her whole. This is reason enough to read the book, but I love what she says place does for her as a writer. While on vacation last year, I sat in a carribean resort bar before it opened and began to write. The place was red-walled, with black and white accents, and no one would expect that suddenly, this place would be where the words I'd been struggling to put down poured out. And so, as I writer, I shared Gordon's thoughts about falling in love with a place that was not hers to own, but one she would remain connected to forever because it was a place "in which you have written happily and well."

she put the "awe" in "ev-awe-cative"

The first essay, "Grandmother's house", made me shut the book and just gaze for minutes at a time. In reading about her childhood, she forced me to revisit my own "places" before I could come back to hers. Rereading her prose is so pleasurable; it 's like glancing twice at an attractive stranger on a street. The first and last essays seemed the most personal, the best "placement" for them. Everyone should reflect upon her life's places after savoring this book.

Another home run for Mary Gordon

Seeing through places is enchanting. Full of the sharp insight and beautiful description I've come to expect from Mary Gordon. A pleasure to read.