Outside Lies Magic:
Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places
By John R. Stilgoe
Walker, $21
ISBN 0802713408

Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller Find it in a WorldCat library Compare prices at major online bookstores

A manifesto opens John R. Stilgoe's new book, Outside Lies Magic. Thoreau would have been proud of it:

"Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people at the end of our century. Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run . . . Walk. Stroll. Saunter . . . Explore."

Exploration is Stilgoe's theme in this pithy, spirited, heartfelt little book. For what they reveal about his preoccupations, it's worthwhile to list a couple of the author's previous books--Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb and Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. Stilgoe is an explorer who knows full well that he doesn't have to journey to Surinam for the exotic or to Luxor for history. Sometimes the fantastic is merely the prosaic viewed in a new light. Stilgoe is a master at providing that thoughtful light. By doing so he illuminates the everyday world most of us live in, the world of strip malls and highways and back yards.

Stilgoe is Professor of Landscape History at Harvard, where he teaches what he calls the art of exploring. "Exploring as I teach it," he writes, "depends heavily on understanding the pasts that swirl around any explorer of ordinary landscape." Stilgoe describes storm drains and fire hydrants as touchable links with larger concepts--the history of a community, of an era, still visible around us, fossilized in the furniture of everyday life.

Anyone who reads this book will inevitably view the interstate service station, electric wires, the rural mailbox, even lawns and pigeons with a new perspective. Seeing the world around you, rather than floating through it like a robot, alerts the eyes, jolts the brain--and challenges society. It's ambitious and rewarding. It's fun. "Whoever owns the real estate and its constituents, the explorer owns the landscape. And the explorer owns all the insights, all the magic that comes from looking." And who are the explorers? You and I.