A Third Place

Last night I finished reading A Third Place and was every bit as impressed as I thought I'd be. I'm too often blind to the world around me, snagged up inside myself, and your book made me keenly-even painfully-aware of all I had been missing. One sentence (among many) that collided with me had to do with how we go looking for one thing and then discover another, which is the case not only in regard to nature but also in regard to people. Also, I was frequently startled by how things I would've passed by without notice caught your attention, then caught your writer's sensibility, then led to ruminations that embraced not only the natural world but also meanings and associations at the core of life itself, including human consciousness, human behavior, and human yearning. It's a beautifully written book. And a beautifully thought book.

-Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried and Dad's Maybe Book

These lucid and brilliant essays on place, like Thoreau's, offer a graceful path amid the maelstroms. Bob Kunzinger's meditations in nature are redemptive and encouraging, and return us to our purpose, renewed.

-Jacki Lyden, author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, and former NPR foreign correspondent

"Nature," Bob Kunzinger, writes, "keeps me in the moment." A Third Place sparkles with greening moments. Standing on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and Rappahannock River, Kunzinger describes sights that lift the spirits and make hours and hearts glow. Like Robert Louis Stevenson who wandered the globe "for travel's sake," Kunzinger explains that "we all go looking for one thing and often find something else." What readers discover are descriptions that delight and thoughts that surprise and awaken appreciation. His essays urge, almost impel, readers to kick the dust off their boots and minds. He makes them ache to be up and about and embracing our bruised but glorious world, to treasure it and its inhabitants anew.

-Sam Pickering author of The World Was My Garden, Too