A room of one's own: is there anybody who hasn't at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn't turned those soft words over until they'd assumed a habitable shape?

When writer Michael Pollan decided to plant a garden, the result was an award-winning treatise on the borders between nature and contemporary life, the acclaimed bestseller Second Nature. Now Pollan turns his sharp insight to the craft of building, as he recounts the process of designing and constructing a small one-room structure on his rural Connecticut property — a place in which he hoped to read, write and daydream, built with his two own unhandy hands.

Invoking the titans of architecture, literature and philosophy, from Vitrivius to Thoreau, from the Chinese masters of feng shui to the revolutionary Frank Lloyd Wright, Pollan brilliantly chronicles a realm of blueprints, joints and trusses as he peers into the ephemeral nature of "houseness" itself. From the spark of an idea to the search for a perfect site to the raising of a ridgepole, Pollan revels in the infinitely detailed, complex process of creating a finished structure. At once superbly written, informative and enormously entertaining, A Place of My Own is for anyone who has ever wondered how the walls around us take shape--and how we might shape them ourselves.

"A glorious piece of prose... Pollan leads readers on his adventure with humor and grace." Chicago Tribune

"A captivating and informative adventure." John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

"An utterly terrific book... an inspired meditation on the complex relationship between space, the human body and the human spirit." Francine du Plessix Gray

"Pollan's success, despite a confessed lack of skill or understanding, is heartening to others hoping to do something similar. His melding theory and practice, when, for instance, he considers roofs, foundations, windows, and walls as both objects and metaphors, makes this book particularly interesting to those content to study architecture from afar — which translates into a rather large group of readers." Kevin Grandfield, Booklist

"This personal and practical meditation on do-it-yourselfism... is as much about soul-searching as it is about hammering nails." Scott Veale, The New York Times Book Review

At a critical time in his life, Michael Pollan, the author of the award-winning "Second Nature: A Gardener's Education", decided he wanted to build a small wooden hut in the woods near his Connecticut home. This absorbing narrative recounts Pollan's construction project, taking readers on a tour of the centuries of wisdom and philosophy that inform the buildings in which we live. 352 pp. Local author publicity. BDD ONLINE feature. 20,000 print.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [303]-310) and index.

Michael Pollan is the author of the award-winning Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, which received the QPB New Visions prize in 1991. He is editor at large of Harper's Magazine and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Pollan lives in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.