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"Who," writes the distinguished geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, "hasn't--sometime--wanted to escape? But from what?" In his fascinating look at the idea of escape, Tuan suggests that all human culture is really a kind of flight, an evasive mechanism, a means of not facing facts: our shelters give us refuge from the weather, our cities give us protection against nature red in tooth and claw, our religion and institutions give us solace against the certainty of death. "A human being," he says wryly, "is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is." Tuan examines the artifacts of our present civilization to buttress his argument. The cornucopia of the modern supermarket, for instance, with its "dazzling pyramids of fruits and vegetables, its esplanades of meat," which promises ceaseless abundance, and the growth of escape-to-nature ideas, which, he insists, depend on an antithetical escape from nature (
nature being, in his definition, "what remains or what can recuperate over time when all humans and their works are removed"). That escape to nature, he suggests, relies on an unfortunate abstraction, one of simplicity. Images of nature, he continues, are often formed from wishful thinking and not from direct experience, and they tend therefore to lack the complexity of reality. Tuan's vigorous essay is provocative, challenging, and a pleasure to read.
--Gregory McNamee
Pressestimmen
"'Escapism'... is not so much an argument as a tour--sometimes a tour de force--of cultural escapes with exotic stops and unexpected twists and turns. And such a convivial tour guide! Tuan is chatty, engaging, unpretentious and charming."--Francis I. Kane, 'The New York Times Book Review' "A reader could hardly ask for a more congenial guide, as Tuan's discussion ranges from Christ's last supper to chimpanzees copulating, from African bushmen barbecuing a turtle to diplomat-author Harold Nicolson bathing in a lake...Through this unusual perspective, Tuan is able to realign things usually considered opposites--'fantasy' and 'reality,' 'travel' and 'home,' 'work' and 'private life'--until they converge in fruitful new combinations...His playful treatment of life's glum realities feels at times as a tonic as a leisurely Sunday morning...An orginal work to be read for both intellectual profit and pleasure."--Jeffery Paine, 'Washington Post Book World' "Writing in a deeply thoughtful style, Tuan, a leading cultural geographer, examines the wonders and atrocities that stem from the human impulse to deny the brutal realities of earthly existence."--'Utne Reader' "'Escapism' is a delightful book that synthesizes the most important themes of one of geography's leading intellectual figures. In keeping with his broadly humanistic and intellectual spirit, he addresses fundamental questions that have occupied him throughout his career: What does it mean to be human? How have humans adapted to and transformed nature in making the Earth their home? What is the dynamic tension between nature and culture? With his answers, Tuan gives us a way of seeing the world that illuminates the relatedness of its parts--and, in doing so, he makes geography absolutely essential."--J. Nicholas Entrikin, University of California, Los Angeles
