Recovering Place

December 9, 2013
In this affecting hybrid work of art, photography, and meditations on place, Columbia University religion professor Taylor (Rewiring the Real) documents his two decade love affair with Stone Hill, located in the Berkshire Mountains, where nature, education, religion, and art converge. Taylor builds upon Hegel’s idea of translating art and religion into philosophical concepts. Reflection, Taylor believes, is “to apprehend what thought cannot comprehend in figures that only the imagination can trace.” The book is broken up into numerous pithy chapters covering topics such as: Displacement, God, Sense, Time, Inhuman, and Burial. These musings, when paired with the author’s own color photos, read as poetic and verbal artifacts, transcend both location and time: brickwork illustrates the deliberate patience of a craftsman; the vibrant face of a flower represents folly, which corresponds to wisdom; a bird whose beak is open mid-song signifies the impossibility of sharing because our unique identities are idiomatic and thus untranslatable. The book will inspire readers to pause, look, and consider. 135 color photos.

February 15, 2014

This protest book that Henry David Thoreau would have understood details Stone Hill, a craggy bit of New England close to Williams College, a 200-year-old liberal arts institution where author Taylor (religion, Columbia Univ.; Rewiring the Real) taught for 34 years. The hill is a place of rocks and streams, home to a vast variety of plants, animals, birds, and a few farmers. Its fauna and flora--and huge, mechanically made rolls of hay--emerge here in 150 or so photographs that serve as the heart of a book objecting to the loss of a sense of place. Taylor's narrative begins in a New York Starbucks, whose founder dreamed of Italian-style coffeehouses but whose near-identical shops serve people who consume expensive drinks and rarely talk to strangers. Taylor's message is one of hope--that we'll rethink a world in which we stay in the great hotel chains and never know that we have left home, and where, more seriously, millions of people are uprooted every year, many by economic forces and wars that send them to places in which they have no roots and very often never find any. VERDICT This book is a reflective offering that delivers great pictures and a moving plea.--Leslie Armour, Dominican Univ. Coll., Ottawa, Ont.

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