Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home

by Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Book Overview

A unique book uniquely of our moment: This is what it feels like to lose the place you love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393329283
• ISBN13: 9780393329285
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

An homage to places we love

Perhaps it is because I am originally from Akron, Ohio, one of the places where fellow native Pierson lovingly writes about with clarity and sorrow. Or perhaps it is just because I love well-written books about landscapes and places. Regardless, this book is still resonating with me several months after reading it. Pierson weaves in her own memoir of the places she has known and lived in her life with their history and quotes from other authors. Along the way she makes the point that we take our landscapes and special buildings for granted until it is too late and they have been replaced by strip malls and a more homogenous American background. For anyone who has ridden their bikes around their childhood neighborhoods or have known each house, each bush and tree, or corner store or the threads of roads and hills which form our memories of place, this book will have great meaning. You will be taken to your home place, wherever that may be, and you will see our vanishing American landscape with greater appreciation. Pierson's lucid, introspective prose is a pleasure to read.

Provokes the Mind

If you have ever raged against the greed of "development" or experienced the sadness of seeing the fencerow you explored as a child plowed under by "progress," The Place You Love Is Gone is a warm and welcome act of understanding and comprehension. Holbrook weaves a tale of reminicence with a subtle but effective exposition of a movement that is destroying not only the places we know and that are part of us; but a "development" movement that is destroying our self. Holbrook's writing style interjects (sometimes startling) facts with an overall story about life in three communities--Akron, Hoboken, and the Catskills of New York. The book has an almost poetic feel and does drag at times. However, overall, the style is effective. One cannot put down this book and not think of his or her first home--and tellingly, that home is probably gone forever for most of us. This is a book that needed to be written and Holbrook did a magnificent job of effectively communicating the effects of the "development" industry without the normal soap box stands. An excellent work and likely to become a classic.

shared nostalgia

Holbrook Pierson's dreamy and emotive look at changing landscapes, both in her personal history and the history of America (mostly) invites the reader to identify the ghosts of their own lost places. The second-person voice points at the heart of the reader even though it is her memories we drift through. What I found compelling about the book was not necessarily her anger at the collective disregard for patience and care for place (it's become so easy to rail, unsuccessfully, against the Wal-marts or McMansions), but her style. The book reads like one long prose poem, full of startling, recognizable and even funny images. That the voice can sound both emotional and right at the same time is admirable. The cries are like a slap in the face to wake up: wake up to what we're losing. There were times I felt this cry might be too one-sided, too apt to romantisize the past or the victims of forced change, but I think Pierson aknowledges this for the most part. She articulates so elegantly what many people feel about "progress".

Interesting but overwritten in places

I enjoyed this book as I am a lover of the history of places and like to know how a village,town or cityscape came about. I felt a connection to the book because of previous work assignments in a dead end Ohio town , being able to see Hoboken from my office and owning a home in Ulster County, not far from the Catskills and only a short hop from Kingston. For me the only disappointments were the overwrought metaphysical language Pierson used in the first chapter in describing Akron and the lack of detail on Kingston, the proposed third chapter. The third chapter is strange in this way in that Pierson is discussing the barbaric approach that New York City used to appropriate clean water supplies ,although the chapter title is about Kingston, she only spends a handful of pages talking about Kingston. These are minor quibbles ,the work done in the third chapter captured the current shape of the county and how it was irrevocably changed by the reservoirs which replaced the drowned villages.

... and not just the place *you* love, either

Everyone I mention this book to gets the same stricken look of recognition and loss on their face. For Pierson's Akron, I substitute a half-acre of scrubby woods across the street from the house I grew up in, a half-acre that, like her Akron, has been torn up in favor of a McMansion with the obligatory SUV parked in front. If not a suburban half-acre, then a working-class neighborhood with its street life and its shops -- or, opening the lens very wide now, entire upstate NY towns drowned for the sake of New York City's reservoir system. (No wonder they hate us!) The thing about Pierson's book is, it doesn't stop at being a mournfully witty, acidulous elegy for one lost place but takes in what you have to call the big picture -- the population growth, the accelerated pace of development, the hectic rush to Mall-Wart and Home De(s)pot and McMansions and wide roads and and and ... -- in which, p.s., most of us, as she doesn't let us get away without acknowledging, are complicit. (I do love visiting a certain Marshall's in a certain formerly charming upstate town, myself.) For my money, "The Place You Love Is Gone" belongs on the shelf next to Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" -- because the writing is just so damn wonderful and angry (and, in Pierson's case, funny too) and because this is one of those books that rings the alarm loud and clear. Most of use have been standing around looking at the latest deceitfully named subdivision ("Spreading Oaks"), shaking our heads and muttering "Wha' happen?" Melissa Pierson will tell you.