Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill

This protest book that Henry David Thoreau would have understood details Stone Hill, a craggy bit of New England close to Williams College, a 200-year-old liberal arts institution where author Taylor (religion, Columbia Univ.; Rewiring the Real) taught for 34 years. The hill is a place of rocks and streams, home to a vast variety of plants, animals, birds, and a few farmers. Its fauna and flora—and huge, mechanically made rolls of hay—emerge here in 150 or so photographs that serve as the heart of a book objecting to the loss of a sense of place. Taylor's narrative begins in a New York Starbucks, whose founder dreamed of Italian-style coffeehouses but whose near-identical shops serve people who consume expensive drinks and rarely talk to strangers. Taylor's message is one of hope—that we'll rethink a world in which we stay in the great hotel chains and never know that we have left home, and where, more seriously, millions of people are uprooted every year, many by economic forces and wars that send them to places in which they have no roots and very often never find any.