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Review by M.D. Morris
Somewhere long ago I heard something like, "In his lifetime a man should write a book, build a house, and sire a son." With A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan touches all three bases: his book, dedicated "For Isaac," his son, is the narrative of his many months of weekends spent confecting his personalized house.
This is not a handy builder's manual because it tells us what ought to be done and why, not how to do it. A Place of My Own is neither a psychological text on achievement motivation, nor a philosophical musing on the benefits of workplace solitude. It is a well-crafted success story of a personal challenge from dream to realization that leaves you with more than you had hoped to find.
For the armchair constructor who wants his castle to materialize vicariously; for the tentative soul who needs the reassurance to go do it; or for the reader who wants to share the triumph of another, Pollan repays any reader for his time.
A former executive editor of Harper's magazine, now writer for the New York Times Magazine, Pollan uses his literary background to enrich what could have been a dreary self-laudatory telling, into a cultural surfeit and an enjoyable brush with applied philosophy. He intersperses nuggets from all seven pages of his "Sources," an annotated list of sufficient additional good reading for a normal lifetime.
A Place of My Own comes at a good time: public interest in self-help house-raising has burgeoned so in the past decade that several TV programs are now dedicated to the notion. The Yester Morrow School, founded by John Connel in Warren, Vermont, teaches adults a complete course in home building from plan to move-in, focusing on environmental compatibility. And so, too, does Pollan discuss in copious detail the real and cultural aspects of the relationship of the house with the ground, the house with the framing, and again with the roofing. But the author's underlying issue is the relationship between the house and its builder, and how they grow together.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.