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Flight Maps: Encounter With Nature in Modern America
Flight Maps Encounter With Nature in Modern America Author:Jennifer Price "I had never planned to become a Thoreau of the mall," says Jennifer Price. Yet that is exactly what she has done in this brilliant debut book. American nature writing is a robust genre embraced by everyone from Thoreau to John McPhee and Michael Pollan. Drawing on this august tradition, Jennifer Price breaks out of the mold and does something... more » wholly original with Flight Maps. Rather than lighting out for the wild places, Price examines the ways in which we have brought nature home to our retail outlets, our front yards, our restaurants, our television sets. What place does nature occupy in our hearts and minds? Price sifts through landscapes and artifacts as diverse as eighteenth-century cookbooks, mall-architecture manuals, dinner menus, lawn ornaments, the Mall of America, and John Waters movies. Flight Maps charts the ways in which Americans have historically made-and missed-connections with nature. The book addresses today's generation of affluent baby boomers, with their urban and suburban civilization and its discontents. Price ruminates on everything from the extreme popularity of The Nature Company and television shows like "Northern Exposure" to the plastic pink flamingo, simultaneously the totem of artifice and kitsch and a potent symbol of our powerful and problematic vision of nature. By turns witty and whimsical, Flight Maps is a sophisticated meditative archaeology of Americans' desire to make nature meaningful in their lives.« less