$29.50 U.S. (short discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Softcover with flaps
220 pages with 24 photographs (17 color; 7 black-and-white), two color paintings, one color etching, one color lithograph, and one black-and-white cartoon
5.5″ x 8.5″ upright/portrait
ISBN: 978–1–938086–28–1
Published in April 2015
Distributed by the University of Virginia Press
www.upress.virginia.edu
by Yi-Fu Tuan
The last book by one of the world’s most decorated geographers!
Yi-Fu Tuan has spent a lifetime as a writer, teacher, and scholar exploring the relationship between the places and spaces that surround us and the inner self. In particular, he has shown, in his twenty-two previous books, what it means to achieve human dignity within the varied communities we create.
Although we humans, by nature, may be flawed, as evidenced by war and injustice and environmental destruction, Professor Tuan affirms that all of us, by virtue of our remarkable senses and even more remarkable minds, are able to savor the wonders of our earthly home, as no other species can. Moreover, we humans are, by nature, moral beings. For this reason, we find true fulfillment and ultimate happiness by doing good, an emptying of the self in service to others that, paradoxically, enriches and extends the self as few other ways can.
In The Last Launch, Professor Tuan’s final book, we are given his views on a vast and complicated array of topics that would seem to require volumes to explore. Yet his essays, expressed straightforwardly, also have their place in conveying big ideas—especially to the often impatient yet deeply curious young at heart, whatever their age. And it is to them that these unforgettable messages in the bottle, tossed hopefully into the sea, are addressed. Who knows what hearts and minds they may stir to life?
About
Photograph © Nancy Nye Hunt
About the Author
Yi-Fu Tuan Yi-Fu Tuan is among the most decorated and influential geographers of all time. A Fellow of both the British Academy and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 2012 he received the Vautrin Lud International Geography Prize, the highest award given in the field of geography and modeled after the Nobel Prize, and in 2013 was awarded the Soplace Award, in which he was recognized as the “Father of Humanist Geography.” For fourteen years he taught at the University of Minnesota, and, from 1983 until his ‘official’ retirement in 1998, he held two endowed chairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, serving as the John K. Wright Professor of Geography and the Vilas Research Professor of Geography. Professor Tuan has written twenty-two acclaimed and influential books since 1968, most recently Romantic Geography: In Search of the Sublime Landscape, Humanist Geography: An Individual’s Search for Meaning, and, with Martha A. Strawn, Religion: From Place to Placelessness. Professor Tuan passed away in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2022. His website is: www.yifutuan.org.
Yi-Fu has earned many awards that make him among the most decorated geographers in the world:
Award for Meritorious Contribution to the Association of American Geographers
Bracken Award in Landscape Architecture
Bush Sabbatical Fellow
Cullum Geographical Medal of the American Geographical Society
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Fellow of the British Academy
Fulbright-Hays Senior Scholar to Australia
John K. Wright Endowed Professor of Geography
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow
Journal of Geography Award from the National Council for Geographic Education
Lauréat d’Honneur of the International Geographical Union
Phi Beta Kappa/Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar
Rowman and Littlefield Author Lauréate
Soplace Award, 2013
Stanley Brunn Award in Creativity from the Association of American Geographers
Vautrin Lud International Geography Prize (the ‘Nobel Prize’ in geography)
Vilas Research Endowed Professor of Geography
Honorary Doctorate from the University of Guelf
Honorary Doctorate from the University of Waterloo
Slide Show
Jinting Wu (education policy, cultural anthropology).Humanist geography is a study of how humans experience, imagine, and transform places and landscapes as they intertwine with the social, cultural, and existential horizons of human society. Sitting at the crossroads of Earth science, social science, and the humanities, humanist geography is multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and trans-disciplinary by nature. The focus of humanist geography, as exemplified by Yi-Fu Tuan’s pioneering works, is through the lenses of religion, philosophy, arts, literature, and psychology to examine how human values, perceptions, and consciousness are embedded in places and spaces. 
Conrad Wiles (sociology, social welfare).Yi-Fu became my informal mentor during my undergraduate career, and he informally taught me about humanist geography. I believe I have a greater understanding and appreciation for how we are shaped by our physical environment and how we shape our physical environment. Each of us sees the world differently in part because we experience different physical environments. I think humanist geographers have a holistic understanding of the relationship between humans and the land and how this relationship has evolved over time. 
Kevin Warnke (political science, African studies, sign language).As someone who has never taken a geography course, my only exposure to humanist geography has been through my conversations with Yi-Fu or a layman’s reading of his books. To me, humanist geography means appreciating that human interactions with space and place are worth studying, whether they take place in the wilds of a jungle or in a family’s home, in a Leo Tolstoy novel or in the words of a pastor’s sermon. Our relationship to space and place is not an obscure or arcane topic; it is fundamental to how we as a species understand ourselves and our place in the world. 
Matthew O’Brien (chemistry, political science, African studies).“Geography” conjures images of maps, sceneries, and landscape stills, detached representations that reduce people to subjective smudges outside the frame. One would expect such sights to line the walls of an emeritus geography professor’s office, marking the places he has been and the contributions he has made. However, upon entering Yi-Fu Tuan’s office one is struck by the utter lack of such hallmarks. The only trophies—displayed on a tack board that catches the eyes of visitors—are of friends, family, and colleagues. “Humanist geography” embodies this ideal by placing people with their perspectives and ideals back in the frame and on the wall. 
Lindy Nelson (environmental studies, landscape architecture).I don’t believe I’m alone in my perception of our world as a messy, complicated place. The more we advance in our understanding of it, the more the relationship between “man” and nature is difficult to comprehend at every level. Tensions in the struggle for scarce resources, competitive world-views, and personal direction appear to grow as we become more aware of them. Humanist geography is the one rational, interdisciplinary approach I’m aware of that can bridge all areas of knowledge in an attempt to clarify our place and inform us socially, personally, and spiritually. If you’re wondering how, read Yi-Fu Tuan. 
Andrew Miller (law, English, music).Humans have always shaped the places they live, but those places and spaces shape people and society as well. My impression of humanist geography is that it explores the back-and-forth between people and places, as they impact each other. What’s interesting is that the impact of place on people and societies is all encompassing, just as human impact on place is shaped across the full spectrum of perceptions and experiences. 
Melanie McCalmont (communication geography, sociology of science).Animals and humans alike communicate about their experience of place. The physical planet knows we are here, too, and responds to human activity. But, unlike the glacier, the deer, the forest fire-we’ve forgotten how to share a place. Humanistic geography is self-consciousness of our impact on place. The glacier does not apologize to the mountain, nor the deer to the sapling. Yet humans stopped natural forest fires until finally we listened, understood that we must share our place with fires. Humans used to communicate apologies and thanks in campfire rituals of joyful dancing and cautionary storytelling. As our impact has increased, we communicate our apologies with a global eletronic network of satellites dancing in the sky and internet stories on how to reduce and repair our technological damage. Does she hear us? 
Hongnian Huang (mathematics, philosophy).In Professor Tuan’s words, “humanist geography achieves an understanding of the human world by studying people’s relations with nature, their geographical behavior, as well as their feelings and ideas in regard to space and place.” I am a young researcher pursuing my ideas in geometry. It is very interesting for me to relate Professor Tuan’s ideas to my own experiences in the mathematical world. Many geometers spend their entire lives to understand space, but they do not care how their theory can be applied to real lives. In many cases, the motivation to do mathematics is only for its beauty. On the other hand, when it is applied, does it do any good? For example, does the complicated machinery built up in Wall Street do any good to the financial market? 
Michael Hsu (Chinese literature, environmental studies) with Professor Tuan.Other geographers study ways through the world and others the ways of the world, while the humanist geographer wonders why we endeavor to do so at all. Often existential in its questions and experiential in its answers, it is a field of study that is both intellectually rewarding and personally satisfying. Humanist geography is academe’s most elegant proof that our Odyssean quests are returns to the self. 
Steven Holescher (American studies, historical geography, photographs as archives).Humanist geography isn’t just an academic field; it’s also, and more importantly, a way of being in the world. It’s about continually opening your senses of vision, hearing, and smell to the grand diversity of humanly constructed places. It’s also about trying to understand those experiences and then communicate their multiple meanings in evocative ways. Although humanist geography is not the province of any scholarly community—indeed, the novels of John Updike, the symphonies of Beethoven, the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, and the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson have helped me with this life-long project—I learned the most from a geographer: my teacher, mentor, and friend, Yi-Fu Tuan. 
Andrew Grant (cultural geography, China, explorer).Humanist geography holds a mirror to human experience. Never resorting to mystifying or obscure language, the humanist approach illuminates experiences both mundane and profound, showing how they relate to the basic human conditions of belonging and separation. Yi-Fu Tuan has deftly probed subjects as diverse as perception, metaphor, emotion, anxiety, fantasy, and religion, all the while remaining accessible to both scholars and the curious reader. Above all, humanist geography reveals how humans secure themselves in a chaotic world, a task accomplished, as Tuan has shown us, by methods as diverse as inventing a cosmogony or frequenting a local coffee shop. 
Chaoyi Chang (urban planning, geography, GIS) and Professor Yi-Fu Tuan.October 15, 2011 was homecoming weekend at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the campus was flooded with people wearing red. Somehow that reminded me of the sea of red flags on China’s National Day. Two different cultures, two different worlds. Which one do I feel more at home in? My nostalgia for China began to fade as I felt more at home in the United States. If there is one discipline that raises such questions and seeks answers to them, it is humanist geography. 
Nicholas Bauch (cultural/urban geography, Italian, photography).The value of humanist geography lies in its ability to enchant the world with meaning and purpose. It is as much about knowing the places around us as it is a guide to being in the world. Practicing humanist geography is attractive because it requires a slowness, a meditation that is antithetical to the breakneck speed at which we are asked to conduct our lives.
Praise
“In this remarkable book, Yi-Fu Tuan shows yet again why he is among the greatest of human geographers. In lapidary prose tempered with hard-edged advice and analysis, Tuan reflects on the consequences of one’s education and life-shaping experiences, the varied meanings of space and place and their influence on personal identity, the role of faith in the arts and scholarship, enlightened counsel to young students, and the legacies of his own remarkable life. The Last Launch is a beautiful collection of original essays on those and other topics, including a concluding section devoted to Tuan’s favorite books, films, musical and dance compositions, and places. These ‘messages in a bottle’ may be Tuan’s last word, but his ideas and writing, as well as his love of learning, will speak to students, teachers, scholars, and devotees of place for generations to come.”
—Matthew Klingle is Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College and the author of Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle
“The Last Launch is a treasure trove of personal visions of wisdom and faith that demonstrate the connections we all have with one another. Tuan’s concluding section of ‘favorites’ alone holds abundant gems from a master scholar who now shares, for the last time in an illustrious career, a lifetime of erudition and teaching. Tuan’s work welcomes readers to gather their own religious and ethical/philosophical foundations that can serve as building-blocks for their own faith and direction, especially in relation to the communities and larger world in which they live, learn, and grow. By entering Tuan’s stories, young readers, especially, are challenged to become more aware of who they are and who they want to become.”
—Dr. Katherine Low, Professor of Religion and Chaplain, Mary Baldwin College
“For more than fifty years and twenty-two books later, Yi-Fu Tuan has been a leading voice in helping us make sense of the world and our place in it. The Last Launch demonstrates that Tuan’s insights remain as relevant as ever. Written with the verve and global embrace of personal experience that readers have come to expect from this intellectual maverick, each chapter is a gift and, indeed, like a message in the bottle: pages clipped from the mind of geography’s most creative thinker, carefully encased in elegant prose, and then cast away in search of people who are curious and interested in seeing and knowing the world in a detailed, subtle, and wondrous light.”
—Steven D. Hoelscher, Professor of American Studies and Geography and Academic Curator for Photography at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin, and editor of Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern Worldeasurable read.”
—Denis Wood, author of Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land
My Place
Surely, Madison, Wisconsin, is one of the most beautiful and livable mid-sized cities in the world. I feel I speak with some authority, for I have lived in many cities, small and large, in a long life and have fond memories of Berkeley and Bloomington among the small and Chongqing, Sydney, and Chicago among the large. Perhaps I am biased in favor of Madison simply because it is my home for almost thirty years, exceeding by far my stay in any other city. But this cannot be the whole answer, for one can fall in love with a city as one can with a human being at first sight, and the love remains even after—and perhaps even especially after departure—for then memory sets to work, embroidering the ordinary into the extraordinary and the merely pretty into the beautiful.
Objectively, Madison has a claim to beauty. It is on an isthmus between two lakes, Mendota to the north and Monona to the south. That’s Nature’s contribution. Architecturally, it is anchored at one end by Bascom Hall, the University’s administrative center, and at the other end by the State Capitol, the former a colonnaded building that exudes academic probity and weight, the latter a soaring dome that exudes State power. The two buildings are linked by State Street, a student haunt filled with eateries, cafes, bookstores, and clothing stores mostly locally owned and operated that, in the regular academic semester, swarm with clients at all hours, from the first break of daylight to the evening when the East Campus clock reads ten and later.
Madison is a city of extremes. That’s another reason why I like it, for I am temperamentally a romantic, one with a taste for extremes of nature and culture. Let me explain what I mean. Of course, Madison’s climate is extreme, bitterly cold in winter and torridly steamy in summer, a scene of ice and snow under a pale-blue sky in January and another altogether of sailboats drifting lazily on Lake Mendota and students loafing with jugs of beer on the terrace of Memorial Union in July. Culturally? What do I mean by extremes of culture? Well, here is an example. I encounter bare-foot children smiling triumphantly with tadpoles swimming in their glass jars—a picture straight out of Mark Twain but only a stone-throw away (well, maybe a couple of stone-throws away) is one of the greatest university libraries in the world, a reminder that Madison may be only a mid-sized town, but its intellectual reach is urbi et orbi.
Lastly, Madison is home for me. Home implies a comfortable and nurturing routine, which is what I have established in my apartment, going every day from bedroom and kitchen to living room with its shelves of books and videos and returning to kitchen and bedroom at the end of the day. But downtown Madison is my home in the same sense—it is my home writ large. Every day I walk from my apartment on one side of the isthmus to Science Hall on the other side, a walk through State Street that takes me about twenty-five minutes.
Friends ask, “Why do you do that?” I answer, “But you do that, too,” the difference being that the corridor they traverse from bedroom to study and then back again is short. My corridor, for the same purpose of transforming myself back and forth from biological to cultural being, is long, being the length of State Street.
Copyright © 2013 Yi-Fu Tuan. All rights reserved.