Prof's Choice

Place, Memory, and Dreams

Alfred Kazin, A Walker lv The City (Harcourt Brace, 1969)—In one of the few books of the genre to use a city as a "place," Kazin chronicles his childhood in Brownsville in east Brooklyn in the 1920s and thirties. "A place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it," Brownsville is a community of poor Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, and Kazin's journey is one toward an idealized "America" and the Dream it promises.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim, at Tinker Creek (HarperCollins, 1988)— Using Tinker Creek and the area north of Roanoke, Virginia, as her field study, Dillard undertakes a "meteorological journey of the mind" (borrowing Thoreau's phrase) and writes a challenging and lush collection about coming to terms with a beautiful and horrifying natural world.

Edward Abbey. Desert Solitaire (Ballantine, 1968)— Drawing from his time spent in the late 1960s as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in southern Utah, Abbey writes a book that cherishes the desert and canyon landscape and rails against the forces of civilization encroaching upon it.

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (Random House, 1992)—In this moving memoir set around the Great Salt Lake, Williams parallels the plight of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge with her mother's struggle with cancer and learns of the inextricable connection between place and people.

NT. Scott Momaday, The Way To Rainy Mountain (University of New Mexico Press, 1976)—"Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth," Momaday writes near the end of this elliptical book, which exploresthe journey of his Kiowa ancestors from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma. The journey is "legendary as well as historical, personal as well as cultural" and reveals that racial memory is influenced by and, ultimately, inseparable from the land.

Osborne