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Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places

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Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places

By: John R. Stilgoe   John Stilgoe  

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Lowest New Price: $3.37
List Price: $14.95

Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

Description:
Outside Lies Magic is a book about the acute observation of ordinary things, about becoming aware in everyday places, about seeing in utterly new ways, about enriching your life unexpectedly.
For more than 20 years, John R. Stilgoe has developed and practiced the art of exploring the everyday world around us, where so much lies hidden just beneath the surface, offering uncommon knowledge if we but know what to look for. In this remarkable book, Stilgoe inspires us to become explorers on our own–on foot or on bicycle–and by so doing to reap the benefits of escaping, even temporarily, the traps of our programmed lives.

"Exploration encourages creativity, serendipity, invention," he writes. And while sharing his insights on how to explore, Stilgoe provides a fascinating pocket history of the American landscape, as striking in its originality as it is revealing. Stilgoe dissects our visual surroundings; his observations will transform the way you see everything. Through his eyes, an abandoned railroad line is redolent of history and future promise; front lawns recall our agrarian past; vacant lots hold cathedrals of potential.

From the electrical grid overhead to fences, malls, and main streets, Stilgoe offers a fresh understanding of the links and fractures in our society. After reading Outside Lies Magic, your world will never look the same again.


Description:
What lies along the highway, just out of sight? How about behind that building? Or under the street? Most of us muse idly about such things as we take our walks or drive our cars, but only a few go further and explore the secret histories of the places where we live. Landscape historian John R. Stilgoe is one of these intrepid explorers; for years he has taught Harvard students to open their senses to the created environment we share, to gently dissect our neighborhoods and public spaces for the knowledge hidden in plain sight. In Outside Lies Magic, he lets us all in on these wonderful secrets.

Guiding us on tracks laid by utility and railroad companies, showing us the hidden territory of postal systems, Stilgoe reminds us that important frontiers lie invisible in our backyards and side streets, waiting for our attention. Though more interested in showing us how to see than telling us what there is to see, his descriptions of power-line right-of-ways, alley-side entrances, and hobo jungles provide compelling incentive for the reader to take his advice to heart and start looking around and asking questions of the community. If you think it's important to "think locally," Outside Lies Magic is an outstanding training manual. --Rob Lightner

Publisher: Walker & Company

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Truely Inspiration - When you drive home everyday and pass the same buildings you have passed for years, you forget, you forget their significance and beauty. After reading this book I stopped just driving by this pieces of art in my city, I stopped and admired ;Admired the beauty and historical value of something that everyone has taken for granted in todays time.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Loved This Book - Outside Lies Magic is like no other book I've read. Written in a flowing, sensuous style, it provides a new way to view the world.
Read it, and your life will change

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Quick, interesting read - Got this book based on a friend's recommendation. Read it this morning. It's one of those books whose ideas far exceed the quality of the writing. Lots of (slightly) hidden details to think about, though the "as you bike about" narrative is pretty annoying.

Especially on the mail delivery and railroad line sections made me think. I remember my granddad talking about twice a day mail delivery, Sunday mail delivery, the fast passenger trains...

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
the magic of the ordinary - This book is the concentrated essence of a life's work. It shows us that connection is still possible in this disconnected age. It shows us that America's history is not captive in printed pages and tv documentaries, but lives all around in the building and in the pulling down, in the shiny new and in the rusted.

Stilgoe does not illuminate the unremarkable, instead he reflects the light that he sees emanating from it. A remarkable achievement. A remarkable book. Highly recommended.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
187 pages of romantic drudgery - This book just seems to go on and on about all the little things we seem to miss in this electronic era that we live in, at face value this does have some truth to it, I myself was intrigued by the concept. But right from the very beginning you realize that these are things that are worth forgetting about. The book seems as if it was written for the specific interests of an autistic child.

I don't care about the why the grass grows the way it does on the interstate freeway and fail to see why anyone else would either.

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