Pollan, a freelance writer, columnist (House & Garden) and editor (Harper's) with no knowledge or experience as a carpenter or builder, decided he wanted a place of his own to write inDan elegant "hut" with electricity but without plumbing to be built somewhere behind his house in rural ConnecticutDand he would build it himself. His aim was "to get away from words," and he signed on a sympathetic professional architect from Harvard Square and a not always patient carpenter. His account of the adventure, which in fact is very involved with words, follows the project from its theoretical stage, choosing the exact site (which characteristically included research into classical Roman, Ming dynasty Chinese, 18th-century British and contemporary "scientific" concepts of site selection), drawing the plans (something of a crash course in contemporary architectural theory) andDfinally leaving theory in the dustDdigging the footings, raising the uprights, laying the roof (perhaps the most entertaining section), cutting in windows and threading the electrical wires. Pollan has a self-admitted weakness for overanalysis, but it is a human failing that should appeal to anyone drawn to his book in the first place. Thoreau gets mentioned a lot, as do Jefferson and Frank Lloyd Wright, but as the project moves toward completionDmore expensively, of course, than he ever expectedDPollan comes to appreciate some very nontheoretical distinctions, such as the difference between windows that swing inward and ones that swing outward. The result is a very special armchair adventure. (Mar.)

Wanting to have a place of his own where he could think and write, Pollan decided to erect a small structure in the woods behind his house. Fancying himself a modern-day Thoreau, he wanted to build his "dream hut" with his own hands, even though he had no carpentry skills or experience. We learn very little about how to build a small structure; the majority of this book is devoted to Pollan's pretentious musings about a variety of architectural theories and about his interaction with the architect and carpenter who helped him (wasn't this supposed to be a simple structure?). Although it cost Pollan $125 per square foot and took him two and one-half years to build, ultimately it is the reader who works the hardest. Libraries serving those with a strong interest in architecture will want this title; other libraries should skip this book.-Jonathan Hershey, Akron-Summit Cty. P.L., Ohio

This personal and practical meditation on do-it-yourselfism...is as much about soul-searching as it is about hammering nails. "Sagacity abounds in this book," Verlyn Klinkenborg said. -- Scott Veale, The New York Times Book Review

An editor at Harper's magazine, Pollan (Second Nature, 1991) spent two and a half years of Saturday afternoons building a "writing house" in the backyard of his northwestern Connecticut home.

"I wanted not only a room of my own," he writes, "but a room of my own making." A "radically unhandy man," he sought the guidance of two "Virgils": architect Charles Myer and handyman/carpenter Joe Benney. Pollan wanted a building custom- suited to his needs as a writer, beginning with the site itself. He found pertinent advice in the works of 18th-century writers such as Pope, Walpole, and Addison, but also made serious study of feng shui, a Chinese art of spiritual landscape. He settled on a site next to a large bolder, overlooking his house and pond. Myer's design, "basically a pair of bookshelves holding up a room," provided for an 8-by-13 hut with computer, fax machine, CD player, printer, and stove all within easy reach of Pollan's writing desk. There was tension from the start between the builder and the architect, with Benney making remarks about architects with their heads "in the clouds, if not someplace worse." As the two lead him through the process, from site location to blueprint and from pouring the footers to framing and setting the roof, Pollan muses on philosophy and architecture, with observations on everyone from Roman architect Vitruvius to Hannah Arendt and Frank Lloyd Wright. When the building is done, he's built "a good place to spend the day . . . between two walls of books in front of a big window overlooking life."

An engrossing, charming enterprise, but after all his poetic waxing for "a place of solitude a few steps off the beaten track," Pollan inexplicably denies himself and the reader a payoff passage that finds him comfortably seated at desk, pen in hand, ready for writing.

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

“[Pollan] alternates between describing the building process and introducing informative asides on various aspects of construction. These explanations are deftly and economically supplied. Pollan’s beginner status serves him well, for he asks the kind of obvious questions about building that most readers will want answered.” —The New York Review of Books

“By shrewdly combining just the right mix of personal reflection, architectural background, and nuts-and-bolts detail, Michael Pollan enables us to see, feel, and understand what goes into the building of a house. The result is 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

“A tour de force . . . [Pollan] writes gracefully and humanely. He is a true carpenter-craftsman of prose.” —Phillip Lopate

Michael Pollan (THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA) is an excellent narrator of his own work. He has a warm, clear voice, and his narration is easy to follow. He delivers his humor well and never laughs at his own jokes. This story of the design and construction of Pollan’s tiny “writing house” is also a meditation on modern architecture and the craft of construction. The listener hears a delightful tension between the young, studious Pollan who wrote the book before 1997 and the older Pollan who reads it in 2010. Sometimes reader Pollan is delighted by the writer Pollan’s perceptiveness; sometimes he seems slightly appalled by the pedantic wanderings of his younger self. The reader faithfully offers each of the writer’s words, but some bring him more joy than others. F.C. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine