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    The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape
    Unavailable
    The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape
    Unavailable
    The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape
    Ebook358 pages5 hours

    The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

    By Suzannah Lessard

    2/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "Unusual and engaging . . . A subjective, Whitmanesque meditation on the way we live today . . . What makes this book compelling is not so much where the author goes, but how she reflects on what she sees when she gets there . . . Her wonderfully trenchant observations cast new light on the everyday." —Witold Rybczynski, The Wall Street Journal

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateMar 12, 2019
    ISBN9781640092228
    Unavailable
    The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape
    Author

    Suzannah Lessard

    SUZANNAH LESSARD is the bestselling author of The Architect of Desire, a New York Times Notable Book. A founding editor of The Washington Monthly and a staff writer at The New Yorker for twenty years, she is a recipient of the Whiting and Lukas Awards, and has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and George Washington University.

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    Reviews for The Absent Hand

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    • 2/5
      Suzannah Lessard believes there is a “deep coherence between our landscapes and the evolving human condition”. In The Absent Hand, she attempts to link the two, mostly by criticizing every kind of habitation available in the USA, from farmhouses to apartments, townhomes to McMansions, ante-bellum homes and even hotel rooms.She relies mostly on her own experience, because she has moved house quite a bit. So there are evaluations and reminiscences of life in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, Georgetown and Rensselaerville, NY, an intersection between the Catskills and the Adirondacks.She devotes the most legalistically detailed descriptions to the evil suburbs, with their edge cities and New Urbanist designs. The disneyfication of purpose-built towns comes in for justified criticism as well. There is a tour of the King of Prussia Mall, which Lessard does not like (same for all malls) any more after her tour than before. There is also a lot of history around the development of the mortgage and its associated redlining, which ensured segregation, and that cities would deteriorate and hollow out. Oddly, there is no discussion of cookie-cutter Levittowns in the northeast. Nor does she delve into the simple truth that there are now well over 300 million Americans, all of whom want their own space. Things simply cannot be the pastoral way they were when the population was half a million. 300 million means more rules and regulations, housing speculation, zoning, planning, endless bickering and whole new developments where once there was a happy balance of nature. Our landscapes reflect our numbers as much as the human condition.The greatest detail in the book is Lessard’s memory of ancillaries. Colors of walls, cleanliness, the blond desk in her hotel room, pastoral fields of various wildflowers, and old houses and mills in her village in upstate New York. Her impressions of the importance of landscaping on the human condition are far more vague, broad and never definitive.She’s not big on change, and waxes nostalgic on everything from farm fields to a boy behind the counter at a long-disappeared deli in Maryland. Still, she ends by saying she hopes for imaginative alternatives going forward. She is not convincing in that.The absent hand of the title appears to be the federal government, which does not direct development or define objectives. Lessard claims several times the USA is unique in the world in this way, but it’s the same next door in Canada, as well as in China, where all such decisions are local (much to the frustration of the central government). Greece doesn’t even keep a land registry, let alone nationwide planning or policy. I must have missed something, because the USA does not seem unique in the lack of national land management to me.Lessard slips in and out of memoir to refer to novels or films, informing her notion of the importance of landscapes. I don’t think anyone doubts their importance and variety. What I doubt is that it is worth a book.At best, The Absent Hand is a very personal memoir, beefed up with tours of cities and suburbs she visited - to beef it up. For example, she is very critical of Natchez as a living ante bellum museum. Overall, as a personal memoir it has some merit for her fans, but as a thought-provoking work, The Absent Hand fails.David Wineberg