The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

<b>"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, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i></b><br /><br /><br />Following her bestselling <i>The Architect of Desire</i>, Suzannah Lessard returns with<br /> a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of<br /> observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of<br /> W. G. Sebald’s work and others of Rebecca Solnit’s, but it is Lessard’s singular<br />talent to combine this profound book-length mosaic—a blend of historical travelogue,<br />reportorial probing, philosophical meditation, and prose poem—into a work of unique<br />genius, as she describes and reimagines our landscapes. In this exploration of our<br />surroundings, <i>The Absent Hand</i> contends that to reimagine landscape is a form of<br />cultural reinvention.