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Praise for The Absent Hand A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Big Other Most Anticipated Small Press Book of the Year Half memoir, half cri de coeur, Lessard's lambent, thoughtful, exquisitely written collection of interconnected essays dissects-as an art historian would a picture, a literary critic a text, a medical examiner a cadaver-a diverse swath of America, from Gettysburg and the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania to Truth or Consequences, N.M.; from the seat of an airplane, 30,000-odd feet above Alaska, to the stoops and sidewalks of Brooklyn during the 1990s; from Georgetown, in Washington, where the author used to live, to Youngstown, Ohio. -Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times Book Review 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 In an elegant series of essays, New Yorker contributor Lessard (The Architect of Desire) explores the American landscape as a metaphor for recent shifts in the national consciousness . . . Throughout, Lessard offers an extraordinary way of examining and understanding the aesthetics of different environments, whether urban, suburban, or bucolic, which will inspire readers to look with new curiosity at the places around them. -Publishers Weekly (starred review) Suzannah Lessard has a truly penetrating intelligence, and here she turns it on a truly compelling target: the landscape that surrounds us, and which we too often see as background if we see it at all. Reading this book will, no kidding, let you look at the world in a new way, and that is a remarkable gift. -Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape is a place-based book in the deepest sense. Lessard's keen observations about selected landscapes in which she has thoroughly immersed herself in order to parse their broader underlying meanings ranks her style with Thoreau's experiential mode of writing. The book is pitch-perfect and filled with cogent philosophical interpretations, a loving and shrewd appraisal of the physical fabric of our once- and still-beautiful but fraught country. -Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies The Absent Hand is like no other book I have read, narrated by a writer whose perceptions and language are as radically original as they are eloquent. Observed with a gentle irony, an abiding lyricism, and an acute sense of the comfortable pieties we live by, Suzannah Lessard's hybrid creation-part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, and part sociological document-is an elegy to the all-but-lost power of landscape. Whether commenting on an abandoned but still vibrant village in the Hudson River Valley, 'suburbaphobia' among the educated elite, the 'peculiar stillness' of Sheraton hotel rooms, or the complex artifice of the Disney vision, The Absent Hand explores the way we inhabit the space around us, physically as well as mentally, individually as well as collectively. It is a wise as well as poignant book, leavened by flashes of humor-one that will make you think about the bargains we have made with our natural surroundings and the price we have paid for them. -Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy One of Suzannah Lessard's great gifts is that of seeing, of discerning and explaining the details most of us skip past. She is also gifted at conveying this precise view. Everyone who reads this book will see the American landscape differently, in its urban and rural variety and splendor and disrepair. Readers will also have a clearer appreciation for what is beautiful and why-and of how the unlovely might be restored. -James Fallows, coauthor of Our Towns In a series of finely tuned essays that track the author's journey from the Hudson Valley into the Midwest and the South, Lessard explores the relationship between humanity and place that once defined us but, she argues, doesn't any longer. -Jonathan Hahn, Sierra This book of thought-provoking essays queries the nature of place, asking landscapes to reveal their meanings . . . [Lessard] eloquently asks us to look harder at our surroundings, and ask better questions about what we see. -James S. Russell, Architectural Record Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive, eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift. -Kirkus Reviews 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 . . . 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 . . . A stellar work of landscape criticism, a rapturous meditation on the revelatory power of place. -Booklist The value of her decades of research is undeniable . . . In this ambitious work, place is examined, deconstructed and incrementally illuminated, even as our landscape changes anew. This broad social-historical consideration of American landscapes will satisfy and challenge the most serious reader. -Shelf Awareness Part memoir, part examination of the American cultural landscape. Lessard offers a unique and necessary perspective on the deterioration of our society's connection to the landscape, manifested most prominently in the book as sprawl. -Aaron King, The Dirt

Praise for The Absent Hand A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Big Other Most Anticipated Small Press Book of the Year ""Half memoir, half cri de coeur, Lessard’s lambent, thoughtful, exquisitely written collection of interconnected essays dissects—as an art historian would a picture, a literary critic a text, a medical examiner a cadaver—a diverse swath of America, from Gettysburg and the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania to Truth or Consequences, N.M.; from the seat of an airplane, 30,000–odd feet above Alaska, to the stoops and sidewalks of Brooklyn during the 1990s; from Georgetown, in Washington, where the author used to live, to Youngstown, Ohio."" —Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times Book Review ""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 ""In an elegant series of essays, New Yorker contributor Lessard (The Architect of Desire) explores the American landscape as a metaphor for recent shifts in the national consciousness . . . Throughout, Lessard offers an extraordinary way of examining and understanding the aesthetics of different environments, whether urban, suburban, or bucolic, which will inspire readers to look with new curiosity at the places around them."" —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Suzannah Lessard has a truly penetrating intelligence, and here she turns it on a truly compelling target: the landscape that surrounds us, and which we too often see as background if we see it at all. Reading this book will, no kidding, let you look at the world in a new way, and that is a remarkable gift.” —Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? “The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape is a place–based book in the deepest sense. Lessard's keen observations about selected landscapes in which she has thoroughly immersed herself in order to parse their broader underlying meanings ranks her style with Thoreau's experiential mode of writing. The book is pitch–perfect and filled with cogent philosophical interpretations, a loving and shrewd appraisal of the physical fabric of our once– and still–beautiful but fraught country.” —Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies “The Absent Hand is like no other book I have read, narrated by a writer whose perceptions and language are as radically original as they are eloquent. Observed with a gentle irony, an abiding lyricism, and an acute sense of the comfortable pieties we live by, Suzannah Lessard's hybrid creation—part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, and part sociological document—is an elegy to the all–but–lost power of landscape. Whether commenting on an abandoned but still vibrant village in the Hudson River Valley, 'suburbaphobia' among the educated elite, the 'peculiar stillness' of Sheraton hotel rooms, or the complex artifice of the Disney vision, The Absent Hand explores the way we inhabit the space around us, physically as well as mentally, individually as well as collectively. It is a wise as well as poignant book, leavened by flashes of humor—one that will make you think about the bargains we have made with our natural surroundings and the price we have paid for them.” —Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy “One of Suzannah Lessard's great gifts is that of seeing, of discerning and explaining the details most of us skip past. She is also gifted at conveying this precise view. Everyone who reads this book will see the American landscape differently, in its urban and rural variety and splendor and disrepair. Readers will also have a clearer appreciation for what is beautiful and why—and of how the unlovely might be restored.” —James Fallows, coauthor of Our Towns “In a series of finely tuned essays that track the author's journey from the Hudson Valley into the Midwest and the South, Lessard explores the relationship between humanity and place that once defined us but, she argues, doesn't any longer.” —Jonathan Hahn, Sierra “This book of thought–provoking essays queries the nature of place, asking landscapes to reveal their meanings . . . [Lessard] eloquently asks us to look harder at our surroundings, and ask better questions about what we see.” —James S. Russell, Architectural Record “Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive, eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift.” —Kirkus Reviews “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 . . . 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 . . . A stellar work of landscape criticism, a rapturous meditation on the revelatory power of place.” —Booklist “The value of her decades of research is undeniable . . . In this ambitious work, place is examined, deconstructed and incrementally illuminated, even as our landscape changes anew. This broad social–historical consideration of American landscapes will satisfy and challenge the most serious reader.” —Shelf Awareness “Part memoir, part examination of the American cultural landscape. Lessard offers a unique and necessary perspective on the deterioration of our society’s connection to the landscape, manifested most prominently in the book as sprawl.” —Aaron King, The Dirt

Praise for The Absent Hand A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Big Other Most Anticipated Small Press Book of the Year Half memoir, half cri de coeur, Lessard's lambent, thoughtful, exquisitely written collection of interconnected essays dissects--as an art historian would a picture, a literary critic a text, a medical examiner a cadaver--a diverse swath of America, from Gettysburg and the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania to Truth or Consequences, N.M.; from the seat of an airplane, 30,000-odd feet above Alaska, to the stoops and sidewalks of Brooklyn during the 1990s; from Georgetown, in Washington, where the author used to live, to Youngstown, Ohio. --Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times Book Review 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 In a series of finely tuned essays that track the author's journey from the Hudson Valley into the Midwest and the South, Lessard explores the relationship between humanity and place that once defined us but, she argues, doesn't any longer. --Jonathan Hahn, Sierra In an elegant series of essays, New Yorker contributor Lessard (The Architect of Desire) explores the American landscape as a metaphor for recent shifts in the national consciousness . . . Throughout, Lessard offers an extraordinary way of examining and understanding the aesthetics of different environments, whether urban, suburban, or bucolic, which will inspire readers to look with new curiosity at the places around them. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) This book of thought-provoking essays queries the nature of place, asking landscapes to reveal their meanings . . . [Lessard] eloquently asks us to look harder at our surroundings, and ask better questions about what we see. --James S. Russell, Architectural Record Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive, eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift. --Kirkus Reviews 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 . . . 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 . . . A stellar work of landscape criticism, a rapturous meditation on the revelatory power of place. --Booklist The value of her decades of research is undeniable . . . In this ambitious work, place is examined, deconstructed and incrementally illuminated, even as our landscape changes anew. This broad social-historical consideration of American landscapes will satisfy and challenge the most serious reader. --Shelf Awareness Part memoir, part examination of the American cultural landscape. Lessard offers a unique and necessary perspective on the deterioration of our society's connection to the landscape, manifested most prominently in the book as sprawl. --Aaron King, The Dirt The Absent Hand is like no other book I have read, narrated by a writer whose perceptions and language are as radically original as they are eloquent. Observed with a gentle irony, an abiding lyricism, and an acute sense of the comfortable pieties we live by, Suzannah Lessard's hybrid creation--part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, and part sociological document--is an elegy to the all-but-lost power of landscape. Whether commenting on an abandoned but still vibrant village in the Hudson River Valley, 'suburbaphobia' among the educated elite, the 'peculiar stillness' of Sheraton hotel rooms, or the complex artifice of the Disney vision, The Absent Hand explores the way we inhabit the space around us, physically as well as mentally, individually as well as collectively. It is a wise as well as poignant book, leavened by flashes of humor--one that will make you think about the bargains we have made with our natural surroundings and the price we have paid for them. --Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy Suzannah Lessard has a truly penetrating intelligence, and here she turns it on a truly compelling target: the landscape that surrounds us, and which we too often see as background if we see it at all. Reading this book will, no kidding, let you look at the world in a new way, and that is a remarkable gift. --Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? One of Suzannah Lessard's great gifts is that of seeing, of discerning and explaining the details most of us skip past. She is also gifted at conveying this precise view. Everyone who reads this book will see the American landscape differently, in its urban and rural variety and splendor and disrepair. Readers will also have a clearer appreciation for what is beautiful and why--and of how the unlovely might be restored. --James Fallows, coauthor of Our Towns The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape is a place-based book in the deepest sense. Lessard's keen observations about selected landscapes in which she has thoroughly immersed herself in order to parse their broader underlying meanings ranks her style with Thoreau's experiential mode of writing. The book is pitch-perfect and filled with cogent philosophical interpretations, a loving and shrewd appraisal of the physical fabric of our once- and still-beautiful but fraught country. --Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies Praise for The Architect of Desire A National Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of The Year in 1996 Few writers have ever captured the exquisite, delicate balance of architecture and memory as eloquently and as movingly . . . In the end this book is about the loss of innocence, innocence about art as much as about life, and while its memories are sad and painful, it is a paean to passion. --Paul Goldberger, The New York Times Book Review An extraordinary memoir. The emotional force of [Lessard's] final revelation is so powerful that to describe it here would be like giving away the ending of a mystery thriller. --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times The patterns she detects in his life and architecture -- 'harmony with chaos underneath, ' an 'atmosphere of joy trapped in silence, with catastrophe latent, ' 'the whirlwind in the calm' -- she also sees in her family's life and her own. --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Powerful...Seductive...Lessard's The Architect of Desire is a turbulent, highly textured memoir. --Elle An austerely beautiful, one-of-a-kind exorcism. --Newsday A haunting family history. --San Francisco Chronicle In this inventive hybrid format -- part social history, part intergenerational chronicle, part personal memoir -- [Lessard] ties together the truth of her family's strong and strange history (a strangeness scarcely spoken about among clan members) by pulling on threads of aesthetic sensitivity and sexual perversity that weave from generation to generation. Lessard writes beautifully, compassionately, with the soft precision of a poet, but her story is a harsh one, and she doesn't shield herself from difficult scrutiny, either. --Entertainment Weekly In the beauty and terror of her prose, [Lessard] gives form to a century of hidden experience, puts words to a century of silence... Language, too, has an architectural dimension. In the right hands, it can span vast, uncharted regions of time and place. And this edifice... is Lessard's gift to her readers. --The Boston Sunday Globe Suzannah Lessard's memoir assembles the beautiful wreckage of a family obsessed, from generation to generation, with art, class and female flesh. ...[S]he transforms her family romance into a much larger vision of desire. --Los Angeles Times Captivating...A powerful story... both well-paced and deftly written... [Lessard] has a true gift for capturing the power of architecture and the meaning that lie behind it. --The Oregonian Dizzying literary brilliance...a literate, cerebral memoir. --Hartford Courant This is a magnificent book. Cathedral-like in form, heroic as to emotional content, it will stand as one of the great spiritual autobiographies of a generation. --Kennedy Fraser, author of Ornament and Silence When a writer as gifted as Lessard makes her debut with a memoir as candid, perceptive and wrenchingly affecting as this history of her family, it is a signal event... The Architect of Desire is both a triumph for her and a resonating experience for her readers. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) Winner of the 1995 Whiting Award and a staff writer for the New Yorker, Lessard is both precise and lyrical, and her disquieting family history is redolent with the hypocrisy of the Gilded Age, rich with descriptions of White's aggressively seductive architecture, and charged by the noble if painful effort of breaking the soul-smothering silence that has plagued her family for so long. --Donna Seaman, Booklist

Praise for The Absent Hand A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Big Other Most Anticipated Small Press Book of the Year Half memoir, half cri de coeur, Lessard's lambent, thoughtful, exquisitely written collection of interconnected essays dissects--as an art historian would a picture, a literary critic a text, a medical examiner a cadaver--a diverse swath of America, from Gettysburg and the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania to Truth or Consequences, N.M.; from the seat of an airplane, 30,000-odd feet above Alaska, to the stoops and sidewalks of Brooklyn during the 1990s; from Georgetown, in Washington, where the author used to live, to Youngstown, Ohio. --Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times Book Review 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 In a series of finely tuned essays that track the author's journey from the Hudson Valley into the Midwest and the South, Lessard explores the relationship between humanity and place that once defined us but, she argues, doesn't any longer. --Jonathan Hahn, Sierra In an elegant series of essays, New Yorker contributor Lessard (The Architect of Desire) explores the American landscape as a metaphor for recent shifts in the national consciousness . . . Throughout, Lessard offers an extraordinary way of examining and understanding the aesthetics of different environments, whether urban, suburban, or bucolic, which will inspire readers to look with new curiosity at the places around them. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) This book of thought-provoking essays queries the nature of place, asking landscapes to reveal their meanings . . . [Lessard] eloquently asks us to look harder at our surroundings, and ask better questions about what we see. --James S. Russell, Architectural Record Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive, eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift. --Kirkus Reviews 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 . . . 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 . . . A stellar work of landscape criticism, a rapturous meditation on the revelatory power of place. --Booklist The value of her decades of research is undeniable . . . In this ambitious work, place is examined, deconstructed and incrementally illuminated, even as our landscape changes anew. This broad social-historical consideration of American landscapes will satisfy and challenge the most serious reader. --Shelf Awareness Part memoir, part examination of the American cultural landscape. Lessard offers a unique and necessary perspective on the deterioration of our society's connection to the landscape, manifested most prominently in the book as sprawl. --Aaron King, The Dirt The Absent Hand is like no other book I have read, narrated by a writer whose perceptions and language are as radically original as they are eloquent. Observed with a gentle irony, an abiding lyricism, and an acute sense of the comfortable pieties we live by, Suzannah Lessard's hybrid creation--part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, and part sociological document--is an elegy to the all-but-lost power of landscape. Whether commenting on an abandoned but still vibrant village in the Hudson River Valley, 'suburbaphobia' among the educated elite, the 'peculiar stillness' of Sheraton hotel rooms, or the complex artifice of the Disney vision, The Absent Hand explores the way we inhabit the space around us, physically as well as mentally, individually as well as collectively. It is a wise as well as poignant book, leavened by flashes of humor--one that will make you think about the bargains we have made with our natural surroundings and the price we have paid for them. --Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy Suzannah Lessard has a truly penetrating intelligence, and here she turns it on a truly compelling target: the landscape that surrounds us, and which we too often see as background if we see it at all. Reading this book will, no kidding, let you look at the world in a new way, and that is a remarkable gift. --Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? One of Suzannah Lessard's great gifts is that of seeing, of discerning and explaining the details most of us skip past. She is also gifted at conveying this precise view. Everyone who reads this book will see the American landscape differently, in its urban and rural variety and splendor and disrepair. Readers will also have a clearer appreciation for what is beautiful and why--and of how the unlovely might be restored. --James Fallows, coauthor of Our Towns The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape is a place-based book in the deepest sense. Lessard's keen observations about selected landscapes in which she has thoroughly immersed herself in order to parse their broader underlying meanings ranks her style with Thoreau's experiential mode of writing. The book is pitch-perfect and filled with cogent philosophical interpretations, a loving and shrewd appraisal of the physical fabric of our once- and still-beautiful but fraught country. --Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies Praise for The Architect of Desire A National Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of The Year in 1996 Few writers have ever captured the exquisite, delicate balance of architecture and memory as eloquently and as movingly . . . In the end this book is about the loss of innocence, innocence about art as much as about life, and while its memories are sad and painful, it is a paean to passion. --Paul Goldberger, The New York Times Book Review An extraordinary memoir. The emotional force of [Lessard's] final revelation is so powerful that to describe it here would be like giving away the ending of a mystery thriller. --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times The patterns she detects in his life and architecture -- 'harmony with chaos underneath, ' an 'atmosphere of joy trapped in silence, with catastrophe latent, ' 'the whirlwind in the calm' -- she also sees in her family's life and her own. --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Powerful...Seductive...Lessard's The Architect of Desire is a turbulent, highly textured memoir. --Elle An austerely beautiful, one-of-a-kind exorcism. --Newsday A haunting family history. --San Francisco Chronicle In this inventive hybrid format -- part social history, part intergenerational chronicle, part personal memoir -- [Lessard] ties together the truth of her family's strong and strange history (a strangeness scarcely spoken about among clan members) by pulling on threads of aesthetic sensitivity and sexual perversity that weave from generation to generation. Lessard writes beautifully, compassionately, with the soft precision of a poet, but her story is a harsh one, and she doesn't shield herself from difficult scrutiny, either. --Entertainment Weekly In the beauty and terror of her prose, [Lessard] gives form to a century of hidden experience, puts words to a century of silence... Language, too, has an architectural dimension. In the right hands, it can span vast, uncharted regions of time and place. And this edifice... is Lessard's gift to her readers. --The Boston Sunday Globe Suzannah Lessard's memoir assembles the beautiful wreckage of a family obsessed, from generation to generation, with art, class and female flesh. ...[S]he transforms her family romance into a much larger vision of desire. --Los Angeles Times Captivating...A powerful story... both well-paced and deftly written... [Lessard] has a true gift for capturing the power of architecture and the meaning that lie behind it. --The Oregonian Dizzying literary brilliance...a literate, cerebral memoir. --Hartford Courant This is a magnificent book. Cathedral-like in form, heroic as to emotional content, it will stand as one of the great spiritual autobiographies of a generation. --Kennedy Fraser, author of Ornament and Silence When a writer as gifted as Lessard makes her debut with a memoir as candid, perceptive and wrenchingly affecting as this history of her family, it is a signal event... The Architect of Desire is both a triumph for her and a resonating experience for her readers. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) Winner of the 1995 Whiting Award and a staff writer for the New Yorker, Lessard is both precise and lyrical, and her disquieting family history is redolent with the hypocrisy of the Gilded Age, rich with descriptions of White's aggressively seductive architecture, and charged by the noble if painful effort of breaking the soul-smothering silence that has plagued her family for so long. --Donna Seaman, Booklist Praise for The Absent Hand A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Big Other Most Anticipated Small Press Book of the Year Half memoir, half cri de coeur, Lessard's lambent, thoughtful, exquisitely written collection of interconnected essays dissects--as an art historian would a picture, a literary critic a text, a medical examiner a cadaver--a diverse swath of America, from Gettysburg and the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania to Truth or Consequences, N.M.; from the seat of an airplane, 30,000-odd feet above Alaska, to the stoops and sidewalks of Brooklyn during the 1990s; from Georgetown, in Washington, where the author used to live, to Youngstown, Ohio. --Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times Book Review 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 In an elegant series of essays, New Yorker contributor Lessard (The Architect of Desire) explores the American landscape as a metaphor for recent shifts in the national consciousness . . . Throughout, Lessard offers an extraordinary way of examining and understanding the aesthetics of different environments, whether urban, suburban, or bucolic, which will inspire readers to look with new curiosity at the places around them. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) Suzannah Lessard has a truly penetrating intelligence, and here she turns it on a truly compelling target: the landscape that surrounds us, and which we too often see as background if we see it at all. Reading this book will, no kidding, let you look at the world in a new way, and that is a remarkable gift. --Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape is a place-based book in the deepest sense. Lessard's keen observations about selected landscapes in which she has thoroughly immersed herself in order to parse their broader underlying meanings ranks her style with Thoreau's experiential mode of writing. The book is pitch-perfect and filled with cogent philosophical interpretations, a loving and shrewd appraisal of the physical fabric of our once- and still-beautiful but fraught country. --Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies The Absent Hand is like no other book I have read, narrated by a writer whose perceptions and language are as radically original as they are eloquent. Observed with a gentle irony, an abiding lyricism, and an acute sense of the comfortable pieties we live by, Suzannah Lessard's hybrid creation--part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, and part sociological document--is an elegy to the all-but-lost power of landscape. Whether commenting on an abandoned but still vibrant village in the Hudson River Valley, 'suburbaphobia' among the educated elite, the 'peculiar stillness' of Sheraton hotel rooms, or the complex artifice of the Disney vision, The Absent Hand explores the way we inhabit the space around us, physically as well as mentally, individually as well as collectively. It is a wise as well as poignant book, leavened by flashes of humor--one that will make you think about the bargains we have made with our natural surroundings and the price we have paid for them. --Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy One of Suzannah Lessard's great gifts is that of seeing, of discerning and explaining the details most of us skip past. She is also gifted at conveying this precise view. Everyone who reads this book will see the American landscape differently, in its urban and rural variety and splendor and disrepair. Readers will also have a clearer appreciation for what is beautiful and why--and of how the unlovely might be restored. --James Fallows, coauthor of Our Towns In a series of finely tuned essays that track the author's journey from the Hudson Valley into the Midwest and the South, Lessard explores the relationship between humanity and place that once defined us but, she argues, doesn't any longer. --Jonathan Hahn, Sierra This book of thought-provoking essays queries the nature of place, asking landscapes to reveal their meanings . . . [Lessard] eloquently asks us to look harder at our surroundings, and ask better questions about what we see. --James S. Russell, Architectural Record Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive, eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift. --Kirkus Reviews 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 . . . 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 . . . A stellar work of landscape criticism, a rapturous meditation on the revelatory power of place. --Booklist The value of her decades of research is undeniable . . . In this ambitious work, place is examined, deconstructed and incrementally illuminated, even as our landscape changes anew. This broad social-historical consideration of American landscapes will satisfy and challenge the most serious reader. --Shelf Awareness Part memoir, part examination of the American cultural landscape. Lessard offers a unique and necessary perspective on the deterioration of our society's connection to the landscape, manifested most prominently in the book as sprawl. --Aaron King, The Dirt

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Suzannah Lessard is the bestselling author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, 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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