The Absent Hand

December 1, 2018
Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive, eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives.Lessard (The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, 1996), a writer and editor for the New Yorker and Washington Monthly, respectively, is a collector of places--and, she writes, she is amazed by people who aren't, as when she observes "how indifferent air passengers are to the view out the window." Some views are perhaps a little cheerless, such as the industrial wastelands of Ohio or the battlefield at Gettysburg. Some are stunning, and all shape the people who live in them without being aggressively assertive about it, as with the New York village in which she finds "something modestly, collectively triumphant," namely, a shared sense of belonging. Landscape, writes the author, incorporates layers of meaning that lie close to the "hidden springs of personhood," joining families and histories to the world. No matter how difficult some of those landscapes may be, from broken urban neighborhoods to abandoned cemeteries, the meaning is there to be sought out. Lessard usually finds something to like, or at least to point out, about the places she brings up for consideration. One good example is Wall Street, where she logged time as a young worker in a financial world "in which women especially were relegated to a lower order"--no problem, really, inasmuch as she was busy absorbing the place and its glorious and messy chaos. The overall feel of the book, which blends poetic reverie with deeply learned geography and history, is friendly if just on the edge of being too much, of becoming encyclopedic. Still, you've got to like a narrative that includes a search for an elusive Staten Island landfill that ends in unlikely self-discovery: "You felt lonely just looking at it, as if you hadn't spoken to another human being in months, years maybe."A pleasant hodgepodge of observations on many places, all of them made more interesting than they perhaps really are--and that's quite a gift.

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March 1, 2019

Lessard (The Architect of Desire) crafts an attentive book that explores how we view and understand our landscape, with a focus on how Americans give meaning and value to their environments. The work is divided into three sections, with the first two dedicated to rural and city landscapes and the third part dealing with businesses and governments that have sought to impose their agendas onto the modern landscape. Much of this follows the author's initial ruminations upon the meaning of beauty. Is it a manicured countryside, an overpopulated suburb, a glass-sheathed skyscraper? Intriguing examples explore how landscapes are viewed by different groups of people. For instance, pastoralism, or the practice of herding livestock, overlooks that these fields were, in many cases, wrought and maintained by slaves. Yet no landscape, argues the author, is without a type of majesty and depth. VERDICT Lessard's journey through the American landscape provides an insightful glimpse into how the changing of landscape aesthetics reflects concurrent changes in society. For readers interested in a unique blend of geography, sociology, and travel.--Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2019
This genre-blurring work of criticism?part history, part travel diary, part personal narrative?explores the contradictions of the American landscape. In episodic chapters, Lessard probes a medley of places: the mountain villages of upstate New York; Brooklyn housing projects; the sprawl and megamall of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania; and plantations in Natchez, Mississippi. What do they tell us? Little about the American landscape is what it seems. Lessard revels in the ambiguities, questioning her own assumptions and challenging the reader's preconceptions. One of her major themes is the connection between the local and the global?how vernacular landscapes are encroached upon, resist, and relate to the homogenizing forces of global capitalism. As Lessard alternates between narrative and analysis, what begins as a pastiche of vignettes builds into an entrancing reconsideration of America's history, from the spaces of the antebellum South through the landscapes of the Cold War and beyond. Some readers will raise an eyebrow at the occasional sweeping assertion and purple flourish. But this nonetheless remains a stellar work of landscape criticism, a rapturous meditation on the revelatory power of place.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)