A book of revelations for relocalizers: Outside Lies Magic: Regaining history and awareness in everyday places

A very nice book for helping learn to focus on the environment around you: the place you live, in other words. This book will help you become an explorer, making your walks and bike journeys through and around Salem more fun and more rewarding.

Click on the image for the full review (excerpted below) from the BookPage review.

Outside Lies Magic:
Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places
By John R. Stilgoe
Walker, $21
ISBN 0802713408

"Exploration is Stilgoe's theme in this pithy, spirited, heartfelt little book. For what they reveal about his preoccupations, it's worthwhile to list a couple of the author's previous books--Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb and Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene. Stilgoe is an explorer who knows full well that he doesn't have to journey to Surinam for the exotic or to Luxor for history. Sometimes the fantastic is merely the prosaic viewed in a new light. Stilgoe is a master at providing that thoughtful light. By doing so he illuminates the everyday world most of us live in, the world of strip malls and highways and back yards.". . .

Anyone who reads this book will inevitably view the interstate service station, electric wires, the rural mailbox, even lawns and pigeons with a new perspective. Seeing the world around you, rather than floating through it like a robot, alerts the eyes, jolts the brain--and challenges society. It's ambitious and rewarding. It's fun. "Whoever owns the real estate and its constituents, the explorer owns the landscape. And the explorer owns all the insights, all the magic that comes from looking." And who are the explorers? You and I.