Deborah Tall

Why does a particular landscape move us? What is it that attaches us to a particular place? Deborah Tall's FROM WHERE WE STANDis an eloquent exploration of the connections we have with places--and the loss to us if there are no such connections. A typically rootless child of several American suburbs, haunted as an adult by the need to belong to an authentic place, Deborah Tall set out to make a true home for herself in the landscape to which circumstance had brought her--the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. In a mosaic of personal anecdotes, historical sketches, and lyrical meditations, she interweaves her own story with the story of this place and its people--from the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois, to European settlers, to the many utopians who sensed a spiritual resonance here and were inspired.

"In the literature of place, Deborah Tall's book stands out for its delicacy, range of learning, and refreshing frankness. We come away understanding how sense of place is not a smug, one-shot attainment but a constant struggle requiring alertness and historical consciousness and imagination."
--Phillip Lopate

"How to feel at home in a region in which one cannot claim ancestral bones? A question, surely, of importance to all mobile Americans. Deborah Tall shows, convincingly, that it can be done. But it does call for an unusual openness to experience, a clear-eyed love of the land and its people, and a scholar-poet's commitment to the details of living. Her new book is humanistic geography at its best." --Yi-Fu Tuan

"If the earth could speak it would speak in the manner of this book: rambling, in circles, like hills and drifting rivers. Tall's patient writing is a pleasure." --Buffalo News

"A worthy contribution to the growing field of landscape studies . . . . Like Thoreau, who claimed to have travelled much in Concord, the author of FROM WHERE WE STAND has travelled much--widely and deeply--in the Finger Lakes." --New York History