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Local Treasures: Geocaching across America (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places)
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| List Price: | $29.95 |
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Product Description
Kelley traveled throughout the U.S. to chronicle the sites and stories of geocaching adventures, from the rocky coasts of Maine to the deserts surrounding Las Vegas to the starting point of the Mason-Dixon Line. Each striking, full-color photograph exposes a vision of America quite unlike that presented in a traditional guidebook: truly off the beaten path, these are non-idealized landscapes, often places with special meaning for the players alone. Kelley's accompanying writings explore the world of geocaching communities, their rare ability to integrate new technologies with the natural world, and their complex and often ambivalent relationships to the surveillance technologies that sustain the game. In this era when people are increasingly disconnected from the land that surrounds them, geocaching offers an unusual and technologically savvy vision for the future. Kelley's text is a fascinating examination of a new and creative diversion emerging from the intersection of the virtual world with the real.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #391470 in Books
- Published on: 2006-02-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 200 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"By way of her remarkable photographs and poetic descriptions, Margot Kelley takes us along for an aesthetic hike rich with cross-disciplinary associations.... An adventure from coast to coast and cover to cover, this book raises a whole host of issues revolving around the land and landscape - ranging from suburbanization to surveillance, Transcendentalism to technology." - Leslie K. Brown, curator, Photographic Resource Center at Boston University"
Review
"What Margot Anne Kelley finds is how this oddly compelling amalgamation of technology and nature provides fresh insight into the ''places that people . . . treasure enough to share freely.''"--Sierra Magazine (Paul Rauber Sierra Magazine )
"A fascinating introduction to a true treasure hunt for the twenty-first century-the GPS-enabled game of geocaching. By way of her remarkable photographs and poetic descriptions, Margot Kelley takes us along for an aesthetic hike rich with cross-disciplinary associations. In words and images, Kelley touches on everything from history to politics to philosophy, allowing us to experience this cultural phenomenon while at the same time re-experiencing our own environment. An adventure from coast to coast and cover to cover, this book raises a whole host of issues revolving around the land and landscape."-Leslie K. Brown, Curator, Photographic Resource Center at Boston University (Leslie K. Brown )
About the Author
Margot Anne Kelley is a photographer and writer who teaches at Bentley College. She edited Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, and her writings have appeared in Antipodas, African American Review, Modern Drama, and many anthologies including Ethnicity and the American Short Story and American Women Short Story Writers.
Customer Reviews
From Cache to Coffee Table
Margot Anne Kelley reminds us of exactly why we started playing this game in the first place! It's not about the treasures you find in the boxes, it's about the treasures in the world around us. The pictures are beautiful and the stories really draw you to the locations. As an added bonus there's that great sense of camaraderie that we get through the shared experience of geocaching.
This is a great book for cachers (especially those dealing with cabin fever) and also a great way to introduce your non-geocaching friends to exactly what we see in this game.
mapping the intersections
This book is an exploration of a new-millennium game; which is to say, it's an exploration of new-millennium humans. And Margot Kelley explores her territory with grace and precision. The book fascinates whether or not the reader is a geocacher because Ms. Kelley so skillfully expresses her own fascination -- not only with geocaching but with the rapidly-changing world that engendered it. With arresting images and insightful stories, Ms. Kelley inspires and includes her readers in the gentle art of Paying Attention. The attention here is on intersections and the trajectories that create them -- the meeting place of latitude and longitude, image and experience, nature and technology, time and place, politics and play, the mundane and the mystical.
Must-Have for Every Geocacher--and Everyone Else
Deft mini-essays, a few hundred words each, face off with arresting full-page photographs of the locations that inspired them. Up in one corner, the mathematical analog, exact longitude and latitude of the place you are looking at, for that was how it was discovered, via a game played with hand-held global positioning satellite (GPS)units and the internet, a game called geocaching. Margot Kelley's essays are at once intimate and cosmic, playful and poignant. Highly personal, even confessional, they are interwoven with public policy comments, next-wave scientific facts, and speculative cultural theory. Each photograph is stunning composition in its own right that also speaks its side of a complex dialogue with text. If you are a geocacher, you will feel vindicated and fulfilled. If you are curious about geocaching, you will be educated and intrigued. If you know anyone who is into geocaching, you have found THE perfect gift. But, in truth, this would be a great book without a single reference to the game. This is place-writing at its wisest, each segment adroitly paired with a visual feast, so that the effect of the whole transcends the sum of the parts. LOCAL TREASURES speaks more truth about Americans and our relationship to our environment than any book since Walden Pond.
