SOURCE: Wildman, Eugene. “Going Away Again.” Chicago Tribune Books (23 July 1989): 4-5.

In the following review, Wildman describes Running in Place as part autobiography, part travel literature, and observes that the book is an expression of Delbanco's “love affair” with the area of Provence, France.

The interplay of memory and landscape is the subject of this non-fiction offering by novelist Nicholas Delbanco. The book [Running in Place] is part autobiography, part travel literature and is an account of the author's several stays in Provence, that storied region of the South of France. It is a description of a love affair with the land, a deepening intimacy, an eventual, inevitable growing apart and the need to have a place to belong to.

Provence has been a favorite locale of writers and artists through the centuries. The traditions of courtly love and the troubador poetry that celebrates it were born there...