Yi-Fu Tuan has written an exciting book based on observations of small events in daily life as well as grand ideas. It is a book that leads the reader effortlessly on, bit by intriguing bit, page by intriguing page, until, unexpectedly, it is finished. Tuan's scholarly books already intimate things about the person behind the intellect, but here the reader gets to know Tuan the human being: self-aware, delicate, playful, serious, and humorous, able to laugh at himself and others. The book exposes the moral philosophy of a geographer and how he sees and interprets the world in terms of the true, the good, and the beautiful. It is written in the finest humanist tradition. -- Annals of the AAG A renowned humanist-geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan has written a book to be shelved with such comforts as Montaigne and Bacon, Brenan's Thoughts in a Dry Season, and Auden and Kronenberger's commonplace books. -- Foreword Magazine What shines through is a generous and welcoming mind, and this distillation of thought and experience is a fine addition to a distinguished body of work. -- Foreword Magazine To those of us who think the human mind more a gymnasium than a massage parlor, Tuan's book has the appeal of prompting us to nudge some ideas out onto the tumbling mats and set them going.

It's excellent exercise, and it comes with clever wit, grace, and charm. -- Southern Humanities Review "In a good society, most things actually work: drop a postcard into a mailbox and it will eventually wend its way to the other side of the globe. But it must not work too well if it is to remain good. There must be room for a little chaos . no chaos, no creativity, no life. A perfectly ordered society would be a dead society.".