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

Part memoir, part manifesto, this exploration of the underside of America’s obsession with safety is prompted by the author’s visit to a thrillingly alarming adventure playground in Tokyo

On a visit to Tokyo with her family, Fusselman stumbles on Hanegi playpark, where children are sawing wood, hammering nails, stringing hammocks to trees, building open fires. When she returns to New York, her conceptions of space, risk, and fear are completely changed. Fusselman invites us along on her tightrope-walking expeditions with Philippe Petit and late night adventures with the Tokyo park-workers, showing that when we deprive ourselves, and our children, of the experience of taking risks in space, we make them less safe, not more so.

Savage Park is a fresh, poetic reconsideration of behaviors in our culture that — in the guise of protecting us — make us numb and encourage us to sleepwalk through our lives. We babyproof our homes; plug our ears to our devices while walking through the city. What would happen if we exposed ourselves, if — like the children at Hanegi park — we put ourselves in situations that require true vigilance? Readers of Rebecca Solnit and Cheryl Strayed will delight in the revelations in Savage Park.

AMY FUSSELMAN is the author of The Pharmacist’’s Mate and 8. As “Dr.” Fusselman, she writes the “Family Practice” parenting column for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Hairpin, and ARTnews.