Common Ground: Stories of Knowledge and Belonging

What do we owe the knowledge that shaped us? And what happens when sharing it means risking its destruction?In six interlocking stories that span four decades and five continents, Common Ground follows masters of rare disciplines. An art conservator who sees hidden layers in colonial paintings. A cartographer learning to map what instruments cannot measure. A chef carrying three traditions of fire in his scarred hands. Each one confronts the same impossible question: how do you protect knowledge that survives only by staying hidden?A documentary filmmaker deletes eleven minutes of sacred footage while a tribal council watches. A meteorologist discovers that the atmosphere preserves the chemical signatures of mass graves.The stories move from a Danish smokehouse to Hong Kong street kitchens, from Bogotá's violence to Alaska's healing rooms, from the stone gardens of Kyoto to the salmon rivers of the Pacific Northwest. They ask what embodied knowledge costs the people who carry it, where fidelity ends and invention begins, and what it takes to preserve something you are terrified of losing.For readers of Jenny Offill and Alice Munro.