Geography & the Art of Life

As a child of war and exile, Edmunds Bunkse developed an early awareness of the meanings of home and homelessness. Born in Latvia in 1935, he and his family first evaded deportation to Siberia in 1941. In 1944 they fled by sea ahead of advancing Soviet troops. Upon landing in Gdansk, they were imprisoned in a German labor camp. At war's end, the family was settled in a displaced-persons camp in Lubeck before finally emigrating to America in 1950. During this sojourn, Bunkse lived in the shadow of communism and Nazism. Bunkse fuses the exterior landscape of his life with wrenching, and poetic, impressions of his World War II childhood to create a stunning narrative that explores an intimate geosophy - the humanistic geography of place, heart, and soul. Addressing a void in geographical writing - namely subjective, expressive, and literary evocations of the individual's place in the world - this unique work weaves autobiography together with keen insights on geography, literature, and art. Through Geography and the Art of Life, Bunkse explores such fundamental concepts as home, road, place, and landscape in light of his own remarkable experiences in the world.