Akiko Busch

Vivid, surprising, and utterly timely, Akiko Busch's HOW TO DISAPPEAR explores the idea of invisibility in nature, art, and science, in search of a more joyful and peaceful way of living in today's increasingly surveilled and publicity-obsessed world In our increasingly networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing has never been both more enchanting and yet fanciful. Today, we are relentlessly encouraged, even conditioned, to reveal, share, and self-promote. The pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but vast and pervasive technology companies, which want to profit from patterns in our behavior. A lifelong student and observer of the natural world, Busch sets out to explore her own uneasiness with this arrangement, and what she senses is a widespread desire for a less scrutinized way of life--for invisibility. Writing in rich painterly detail about her own life, her family, and some of the world's most exotic and remote places--from the Cayman Islands to Iceland--she savors the pleasures of being unseen. Discovering and dramatizing a wonderful range of ways of disappearing, from virtual reality goggles that trick the wearer into believing her body has disappeared and to the way Virginia Woolf's fictional Mrs. Dalloway feels a flickering of personhood as an older woman, Busch deliberates on subjects new and old with equal sensitivity and incisiveness. A unique and exhilarating accomplishment, HOW TO DISAPPEAR is a shimmering collage of poetry, cinema, memoir, myth, and much more, which overturns the dangerous modern assumption that somehow fame and visibility equate to success and happiness. Busch presents a field guide to invisibility, reacquainting us with the merits of the inconspicuousness, and finds genuine alternatives to the typical life of perpetual exposure. Accessing timeless truths in order to speak to our most urgent contemporary problems, she inspires us to develop a deeper appreciation for personal privacy in a vast and invasive world.

Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

How to Disappear

'Geography Of Home' is a meditative tour of the home. Busch looks at the emotional attachments we have to a house and the way those attachments change with time and technology.

Essays on Architecture, Psychology, and the History of House and Home in America

Geography of Home

The Print Casebooks: The best in environmental graphics (V4)

In a literary tour of the spaces of our homes, Geography of Home reflects on how we define such elusive qualities as privacy, security, and comfort. Part social history, part architectural history, part personal anecdote, this book uncovers the hidden meanings of the place we call home. These writings touch on our culture's fundamental issues: the notion of family, the aging of the population, working at home, and respect for the environment. Together, these essays help us understand not only what home means for each of us, but how our idea of home shapes our place in the world.

Writings on Where We Live

Mary Ruefle

Hollis Seamon

John Crowley

Jim Shepard

Jeffrey Ford

Kij Johnson

Sofia Samatar

Paul Di Filippo

John Seven

Sonia Sanchez

Karin Lowachee

Paul Park

Sarena Ulibarri

Gregory Scheckler

Izzy Wasserstein

Renee Simms

Safia Elhillo

Simone Muench

Tina Connolly

Jorie Graham

Kirsten Imani Kasai

Sara St. Antoine

Karen Shepard

Unoma Azuah

Andrea Martinez Corbin

Shawn Frazier

Christine Poreba

Jennifer Rapaport

Erin Roberts

Marjorie Thomsen

anthology of fine art images from Laura Christensen, and fiction and poetry from numerous authors

Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty Writers

Then Again

Sare St. Antoine

anthology of fine art images from Laura Christensen, and fiction and poetry from numerous authors -- compared to the larger THEN AGAIN featuring over thirty authors, THEN AGAIN Remix is a smaller edition containing works by ten authors.

Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Ten Writers

Then Again (Remix)

Bertrand Russell

Jack London

Christopher Knight

Valerie Solanas

Richard Wright

Edith Wharton

Bram Stoker

Dave Hickey

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Banana Yoshimoto

Charles Baudelaire

Ruth Reichl

Jonathan Swift

Epictetus

Richard Grossman

Eddy Joe Cotton

Jeffrey Vallance

Jorgen de Mey

This box contains 24 great little books, each readable in a single sitting.

BuKapalooza

A collection of 60 short essays by best-selling author and culture and design critic Akiko Busch, in her classic style of observation, that reflect on the human condition and offer the promise of calm and insight. Akiko Busch writes on the topics of culture, design, and nature. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for 20 years and has also written regular columns and essays for such publications as The New York Times, House & Garden, Architectural Record, Dwell, New York Magazine, and Travel & Leisure, among others. She offers intimate, reflective observations of the human condition in this collection of short works, touching on themes of faith, love, loss, disaster, anticipation, obscurity, and utility. These sixty short pieces explore the mystery of place, memory, and what it is about domestic life that is both settling and unsettling alike. In a world of text messages and instant information, Busch's style of observation reminds the reader to slow down, take in, and live in the moment.

Notes on Home

Everything Else Is Bric-A-brac

"A search for a radio-tagged Indiana bat roosting in the woods behind her house in New York's Hudson Valley led Akiko Busch to assorted other encounters with the natural world--local ecological monitoring projects, community-organized cleanup efforts, and data-driven citizen science research. Whether it is pulling up water chestnuts in the Hudson River, measuring beds of submerged aquatic vegetation, or searching out vernal pools, all are efforts that illuminate the role of ordinary citizens as stewards of place. In this elegantly written book, Busch highlights factors that distinguish twenty-first-century citizen scientists from traditional amateur naturalists: a greater sense of urgency, helpful new technologies, and the expanded possibilities of crowdsourcing. The observations here look both to precisely recorded data sheets and to the impressionistic marginalia, scribbled asides, and side roads that often attend such unpredictable outings. While not a primer on the prescribed protocols of citizen science, the book combines vivid natural history, a deep sense of place, and reflection about our changing world. Musing on the expanding potential of citizen science, the author celebrates today's renewed volunteerism and the opportunities it offers for regaining a deep sense of connection to place."-- ǂc Publisher description.

Reflections on Citizen Science

The Incidental Steward

Philippe Vergne

Joshua Gamson

Walker Art Center

Susan G. Davis

Dike Blair

Emma Duncan

Contributors include Philippe Vergne, Dike Blair, Akiko Busch, Susan Davis, Emma Duncan, Joshua Gamson.

Life's Guilty Pleasures

Let's Entertain

From Thoreau to Edward Abbey to Annie Dillard, American writers have looked at nature and described the sublime and transcendent. Now comes Akiko Busch, who finds multitudes of meaning in the practice of swimming across rivers. The notion that rivers divide us is old and venerated, but they also limn our identities and mark the passage of time; they anchor communities and connect one to another. And, in the hands of writer and swimmer Akiko Busch, they are living archives of human behavior and natural changes. After a transformative swim across the Hudson just before September 11, Busch undertook to explore eight of America's great waterways: the Hudson (twice), the Delaware, the Connecticut, the Susquehanna, the Monongahela, the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Current. She observes each river's goings-on and reflects on its history (human and natural) and possible futures. Some of the rivers have rebounded from past industrial misuse; others still struggle with pollution and waste. The swims are also opportunities to muse on the ordinary passages faced by most of us-the death of a parent, raising children, becoming older-and the ways in which the rhythms and patterns of the natural world can offer reassurance, ballast and inspiration. A deeply moving exploration of the themes of renewal and reclamation at midlife, Nine Ways to Cross a River is a book to be treasured and given to friends.

Midstream Reflections on Swimming and Getting There from Here

Nine Ways to Cross a River

In a day and age when rapid-fire text messaging and the "Slow" movement are both offered as strategies for making the most out of life, our ability to negotiate time seems ever more crucial. Here, Akiko Busch offers personal anecdotes, descriptions of natural phenomena, and quotations from enlightened thinkers that explore the relationship between time, patience, and the natural world.

Taking Time in an Age of Acceleration

Patience

"In The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, Akiko Busch devotes a chapter each to twelve objects, looking at the reasons these items took the forms they did and discussing how everyday things acquire their significance through daily human experience."--Jacket.

Essays on Design and the Everyday

The Uncommon Life of Common Objects

Akiko Busch

Books

Your next favorite book is out there