A review by melissa_lound
Savage Park: A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die by Amy Fusselman

4.0

I went into this thinking it was going to be along the lines of that Atlantic article a few years back, about the adventure playgrounds. It sort of is...but really I guess it's not. At first I was sort of disappointed: she almost glosses over the parts about the Japanese playground and the wild, dangerous adventure it represents. She and her family visit and accept the playground in an almost anticlimactic fashion. I expected a treatise on how American parents over-shelter their kids, and how revelatory the experience of visiting the adventure playground was for her, but really the playground was just a jumping off point for a very lovely examination of play, and how mindlessly yet anxiously we move through most of our days. I really enjoyed Amy Fusselman's other books, and her writing and persona here are no less winning. Overall, once I moved past my own assumptions about this book, I found it to be a very enjoyable and thoughtful read.