"Maybe the main influential pupil you have by no means heard of" was once how a function article within the Chronicle of upper schooling lately defined Yi-Fu Tuan, a broadly traveled Chinese-American geographer whose letters to his buddies and associates, distilling observations, rules, and reports, have carried Tuan's insights, and his acceptance, some distance past his selected box. Culling the main attribute ideas and compelling moments from those prized letters, expensive Colleague in the end supplies readers close to and much the chance to percentage what Tuan's correspondents have already experienced-and to find the pleasures of the underlined passages in a booklet of lifestyles instantly edifying, enjoyable, and exemplary.
Reflecting on own encounters and impersonal forces, Tuan conducts us alongside a direction that leads from nature to human nature, via society and tradition, geography and heritage, morality and faith, lifestyles and demise. by way of turns playful and aphoristic, those letters carry revelations either funny and harrowing. even if browsed for his or her massive incidental pleasures or perused extensive from commencing to finish, they come up with the money for their reader the infrequent inside wisdom of one other man or woman and his global, and a good rarer glimpse of the connections among sensation and mind that lie on the very center of the humanistic enterprise.
Imparting the insights of a well known student, revealing the tensions-and contradictions-that exist among lifestyles and concept, remarking on principles from different thinkers, and increasing on perennial concerns of morality and that means, faith and formality, excitement and soreness, pricey Colleague maps Tuan's personal humanity in a lucid, dependent, and remarkable approach.
Yi-Fu Tuan is professor emeritus within the division of Geography on the college of Wisconsin. he's greatly thought of the founding father of human geography, and is the writer of many books together with Cosmos and fireside (1996) and house and position (new version, 2001), released by means of the collage of Minnesota Press. he's additionally the writer of books on barren region landforms, China, the historical past of rules, and an autobiography, Who Am I? (1999).