Treehouses lift the spirits. They inspire dreams. They represent freedom: from adults or adulthood, from duties and responsibilities, from an earthbound perspective. If we can't fly with the birds, at least we can nest with them. With lively writing and beautiful photographs, Treehouses paints a fascinating portrait of this ingenious branch of architecture. It provides a brief history of treehouses, from Caligula through the Medici to Queen Victoria. It shows how to design and build a treehouse, from picking the right tree to shingling the roof. And it tells the stories of dozens of treehouses and the people who built them, from simple platforms nailed together by kids to arboreal palaces constructed and lived in by grown-ups. The centerpiece of the book is a photo essay showing Pete Nelson building a spectacular octagonal treehouse thirty feet up an old-growth fir on Saltspring Island in British Columbia. With two hundred square feet of floor space, cedar paneling, and leaded French doors, the Saltspring treehouse is one of the finest specimens of the treehouse builder's art. Anyone who has ever built a treehouse, or dreamed of it, or read Swiss Family Robinson, will find Treehouses irresistible.

This work examines the reasons why anthropologists have not used the camera as a research instrument or film as a means of communicating ethnographic knowledge. It suggests that images and words in this discipline operate on different logical levels; that they are hierarchically related; that whereas writings may encompass the images produced by film, the inverse of this cannot be true. The author argues for this position further by suggesting that the visual is to the written mode as 'thin description' (giving a record of the form of behaviour) is to 'thick description' (giving an account of meaning).