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Simon Winchester in the New York Times just now: Philip Marsden’s RISING GROUND: A Search for the Spirit of Place (University of Chicago, $27.50) doesn’t require the author to venture very far from his home in Cornwall, yielding a travel book that involves little real, physical travel. And yet Marsden’s essays about landscape and history and the habitations and habitants of that mysterious, familiar but deeply unknown fingerlike peninsula at England’s lower left-hand, seagirt end are deft and exquisite, filled with the learning of a supremely well-traveled man and composed in a lilting, finely chased prose. I immersed myself for hours in the comforting blanket of this book, lulled into fond memories of my own. My very first job as a reporter, based in the gritty coal-mining northeast of England, once required me to visit Cornwall, but there was no budget and I had to hitchhike and camp out on Bodmin Moor. In a cafe near Liskeard, I met a wandering American student of quite astonishing beauty, and she spent an evening with me under one of the granite tors, a place called the Cheesewring. She cooked for me and played Joni Mitchell songs on her guitar. And then, for fun, she tried to balance a pile of small stones on the grass, intending to echo those that had been piled by nature on the tor. Almost half a century later, Marsden observes a woman at the very same place. She “picked a flattish stone and added it to one of the waist-high cairns, the mini-Cheesewrings that had been put up by recent visitors. The stone kept falling off and she bent down close to position it. Very gently she released her finger and thumb. She held them there for a moment. This time the stone was still.”