Download The Absent Hand Reimagining Our American Landscape edition by Suzannah Lessard Politics Social Sciences eBooks
Download As PDF : The Absent Hand Reimagining Our American Landscape edition by Suzannah Lessard Politics Social Sciences eBooks
This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place, and reimagining our American landscape
Following her bestselling The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard returns with a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of W. G. Sebald’s work and others of Rebecca Solnit’s, but it is Lessard’s singular talent to combine this profound book-length mosaic—a blend of historical travelogue, reportorial probing, philosophical meditation, and prose poem—into a work of unique
genius, as she describes and reimagines our landscapes. In this exploration of our surroundings, The Absent Hand contends that to reimagine landscape is a form of cultural reinvention.
This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place and reimagining the world in a time of transition. Whether it be climate change altering the meaning of nature, or digital communications altering the nature of work, the effects of global enclosure on the meaning of place are panoramic, infiltrative, inescapable. No one will finish this book, this journey, without having their ideas of living and settling in their surroundings profoundly enriched.
Download The Absent Hand Reimagining Our American Landscape edition by Suzannah Lessard Politics Social Sciences eBooks
"It is so difficult these days to find books that don’t drag partisan politics into whatever they are supposed to be about, to just get away from that endless war. Based on a favorable Wall Street Journal review, I gave the book a try. The sample held up to the review - luminous writing and a deep understanding of place. So I bought it. Things changed rapidly from appreciation of American spaces to political screed. Suddenly we’ve transitioned from moving descriptions of natural and human scenes to the alleged sins of “conservative legislators.†Then we are hearing that only two alleged examples of American exceptionalism have held up - our “foundation in slavery†and “that we introduced the far extreme of modern weaponry to the world.†There is acknowledgment of our achievements in space, not as exceptionalism, but rather in support of the theory that Apollo 8’s photos of Earth had so destroyed the idea of religion and patriotism that the government put an end to space exploration to preserve them. Presumably, those conservative legislators at work again. It goes on in this vein. The author visits various places and, after reading old newspapers and talking to people as preparation, drops in as from the sky to identify America’s sins and failures in them. The landscapes are relentlessly political, the judgments freely dispensed. Slavery and the atomic bomb cast shadows everywhere. The descriptive writing - how places look and feel - is first rate. The prescriptive writing - political and ideological judgments - is tiresome. There is far too much slogging through the latter needed to get to the former. How very very sad it must be to live in a nation that disappoints you so thoroughly and to so misapprehend its soul, its worth, its exceptional qualities."
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The Absent Hand Reimagining Our American Landscape edition by Suzannah Lessard Politics Social Sciences eBooks Reviews :
The Absent Hand Reimagining Our American Landscape edition by Suzannah Lessard Politics Social Sciences eBooks Reviews
- It is so difficult these days to find books that don’t drag partisan politics into whatever they are supposed to be about, to just get away from that endless war. Based on a favorable Wall Street Journal review, I gave the book a try. The sample held up to the review - luminous writing and a deep understanding of place. So I bought it. Things changed rapidly from appreciation of American spaces to political screed. Suddenly we’ve transitioned from moving descriptions of natural and human scenes to the alleged sins of “conservative legislators.†Then we are hearing that only two alleged examples of American exceptionalism have held up - our “foundation in slavery†and “that we introduced the far extreme of modern weaponry to the world.†There is acknowledgment of our achievements in space, not as exceptionalism, but rather in support of the theory that Apollo 8’s photos of Earth had so destroyed the idea of religion and patriotism that the government put an end to space exploration to preserve them. Presumably, those conservative legislators at work again. It goes on in this vein. The author visits various places and, after reading old newspapers and talking to people as preparation, drops in as from the sky to identify America’s sins and failures in them. The landscapes are relentlessly political, the judgments freely dispensed. Slavery and the atomic bomb cast shadows everywhere. The descriptive writing - how places look and feel - is first rate. The prescriptive writing - political and ideological judgments - is tiresome. There is far too much slogging through the latter needed to get to the former. How very very sad it must be to live in a nation that disappoints you so thoroughly and to so misapprehend its soul, its worth, its exceptional qualities.
