As a cultural resource manager who has worked and struggled with Traditional Cultural Properties for years, Tom King's new book puts many of my past experiences into perspective and provided new ideas and insights for future practice. Anyone responsible for managing and protecting TCPs will find King's compassionate and pragmatic perspectives to be both interesting and valuable.
Darby Stapp, Hanford Cultural Resources Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Places that Count aims to help members of the heritage preservation community understand and recognize traditional cultural places in all their kaleidoscopic and culturally variegated forms. This volume is an elegant and eloquent presentation of preservation laws and regulations, coupled with King’s philosophical ruminations about how they might have been, and might yet be, better used in the interests of everyone concerned with historic preservation of places and the multiplicity of meanings attached thereto. King knows preservation laws and regulations perhaps better than any one in the country, and is keenly aware that, in the end, both are matters of (often contested) interpretation. We would do well, in the interests of heritage preservation in general and traditional cultural places in particular, to listen to and act upon—what he has to tell us.
Don Fowler
University Of Nevada, Reno