Good Travel Books Are Novels At Heart.

Seattle Is Not An Overly Friendly City. It Is A Civil City, But Not Altogether Friendly. People From Outside Mistake The Civility For Friendliness. Seattle Is Full Of People Who Have Their Own Lives To Live. They Won't Waste Their Time Being Friendly. But They Are Civil.

It Always Seems To Me Odd To Call A Place A Wilderness When Every Wilderness Area In The Us Bristles With Rules And Regulations As To How You Can Behave, What You're Allowed To Do, And Is Patrolled By Armed Rangers Enforcing The Small Print. They're Parks, Of Course, Not Wildernesses At All.

Living In Cities Is An Art, And We Need The Vocabulary Of Art, Of Style, To Describe The Peculiar Relationship Between Man And Material That Exists In The Continual Creative Play Of Urban Living. The City As We Imagine It, Then, Soft City Of Illusion, Myth, Aspiration, And Nightmare, Is As Real, Maybe More Real, Than The Hard City One Can Locate On Maps In Statistics, In Monographs On Urban Sociology And Demography And Architecture.

Sociology And Anthropology Are Not Disciplines Which Take Easily To Situations Where People Are Able To Live Out Their Fantasies, Not Just In The Symbolic Action Of Ritual, But In The Concrete Theater Of Society At Large.

'dreams From My Father' Reveals More About Obama Than Is Usually Known About Political Leaders Until After They're Dead. Perhaps More Than It Intends, It Shows His Mind Working, In Real Time, Sentence By Sentence, In What Feels Like A Private Audience With The Reader.