Dear Colleague. Common And Uncommon Observations

Eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan's letters to his friends and colleagues-distilling observations, ideas, and experiences-have carried Tuan's insights, and his reputation, far beyond his chosen field. Culling the most characteristic thoughts and compelling moments from these prized letters, Dear Colleague at long last gives readers near and far the opportunity to share what Tuan's correspondents have already read - and to discover the pleasures of the underlined passages in a book of life at once edifying, entertaining, and exemplary. Reflecting on personal encounters and impersonal forces, Tuan conducts us along a path that leads from nature to human nature, through society and culture, geography and history, morality and religion, life and death. By turns playful and aphoristic, these letters hold revelations both humorous and harrowing. Whether browsed for their considerable incidental pleasures or perused in depth from beginning to end, they afford their reader the rare interior knowledge of another human being and his world, and an even rarer glimpse of the connections between sensation and intellect that lie at the very heart of the humanistic enterprise.