Moving Around

Michael Webb is a Los Angeles based writer who has authored more than twenty books on architecture and design, most recently Architects' Houses, and Building Community: New Apartment Architecture, while contributing essays to many more. He is also a regular contributor to leading journals in the United States and Europe. Growing up in London, he was an editor at The Times and Country Life, before moving to the US. He was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his services to French culture.

Moving Around is a kind of travel sketchbook -- with Webb's photographs standing in for the hand-drawn images and tangible souvenirs of the places visited, and his words for the captions or other markings. It's possible to construct a memoir from these kinds of sketches. Mark Twain certainly did. The travel writings of Rebecca West amount to a kind of fragmented memoir. Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia (1977) could be described as the kernel of a memoir contained within a kind of anthropological expedition. Webb clearly understands the extension through space, the trace of hand and eye, the sense of passage, that makes for story. We want to enter these enveloping spaces, feel Webb's own sense of place.--Ezrha Jean Black "Los Angeles Review of Books "