Synopses & Reviews
Part memoir, part manifesto, this exploration of the underside of America's obsession with safety is prompted by the authora's visit to a thrillingly alarming adventure playground in Tokyo
"How fully can the world be explored," asks Amy Fusselman " ...if you are also trying not to die? "
On a visit to Tokyo with her family, Fusselman stumbles on Hanegi playpark, where children are sawing wood, hammering nails, stringing hammocks to trees, building open fires. When she returns to New York, her conceptions of space, risk, and fear are completely changed. Fusselman invites us along on her tightrope-walking expeditions with Philippe Petit and late night adventures with the Tokyo park-workers, showing that when we deprive ourselves, and our children, of the experience of taking risks in space, we make them less safe, not more so.
Savage Park is a fresh, poetic reconsideration of behaviors in our culture that — in the guise of protecting us — make us numb and encourage us to sleepwalk through our lives. We babyproof our homes; plug our ears to our devices while walking through the city. What would happen if we exposed ourselves, if — like the children at Hanegi park — we put ourselves in situations that require true vigilance? Readers of Rebecca Solnit and Cheryl Strayed will delight in the revelations in Savage Park.
Review
"Amy Fusselman writes with a unique depth of feeling, and Savage Park is a fascinating and daresay essential meditation on childhood, parenthood, and the importance of wild spaces for those wild creatures known as kids." Dave Eggers
Review
“I yield to no one in my admiration for Amy Fusselman’s work. Her new book, Savage Park, further explores with astonishing power, eloquence, precision, and acid humor her obsessive, necessary theme: the gossamer-thin separation between life and death.” David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
Review
“Fusselman’s mind is a playground in and of itself. [Her] prose has a spare, clean elegance that can carry a knife-like precision.” San Francisco Chronicle
Review
“This brief, passionate book...never fails to engage.” Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
Synopsis
Part memoir, part manifesto, this exploration of the underside of America's obsession with safety is prompted by the author's visit to a thrillingly alarming adventure playground in Tokyo.
About the Author
Amy Fusselman is the author of The Pharmacist's Mate and 8. As "Dr." Fusselman, she writes the "Family Practice" parenting column for McSweeneyandrsquo;s Internet Tendency. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Hairpin, and ARTnews.
Table of Contents
Part I
1. NSEW 3
2. Above and Below 25
3. What There Is to See 44
4. Savage Park 63
5. More 89
Part II
6. SSOF 99
7. Red Butterflies 111
8. American Wind 119
9. The Structures Tremble 127
Resources 131
Acknowledgments 135