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John Stilgoe is just looking around. This is more difficult than it sounds, particularly in our mediated age, when advances in both theory and technology too often seek to replace the visual evidence before our own eyes rather than complement it. We are surrounded by landscapes charged with our past, and yet from our earliest schooldays we are instructed not to stare out the window. Someone who stops to look isn?t only a rarity; he or she is suspect.

Landscape and Images records a lifetime spent observing America?s constructed landscapes. Stilgoe?s essays follow the eclectic trains of thought that have resulted from his observation, from the postcard preference for sunsets over sunrises to the concept of "teen geography" to the unwillingness of Americans to walk up and down stairs. In Stilgoe's hands, the subject of jack o? lanterns becomes an occasion to explore centuries-old concepts of boundaries and trespassing, and to examine why this originally pagan symbol has persisted into our own age. Even something as mundane as putting the cat out before going to bed is traced back to fears of unwatched animals and an untended frontier fireplace. Stilgoe ponders the forgotten connections between politics and painted landscapes and asks why a country whose vast majority lives less than a hundred miles from a coast nonetheless looks to the rural Midwest for the classic image of itself.

At times breathtaking in their erudition, the essays collected here are as meticulously researched as they are elegantly written. Stilgoe?s observations speak to specialists?whether they be artists, historians, or environmental designers?as well as to the common reader. Our landscapes constitute a fascinating history of accident and intent. The proof, says Stilgoe, is all around us.

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CHOICE Review

As usual, landscape scholar Stilgoe (Harvard) has introduced this reviewer to a new word: "scryer." Scryers see things others miss; they have the gift of heightened vision; they move into, through, and beyond perceived worlds. This Stilgoe does with several domains of the environmental, architectural, scholarly, and visual worlds that surround people and frame their consciousnesses: landscapes of the past, rural places, contemporary constructions, photographic representations, library catalogs as place-makers. This reviewer was initially disappointed to find that the book is a collection of past Stilgoe pieces, 19 prior to, and only 10 after, 1990. But they are organized into five sections, each of which is rich in the author's allusions to post 9/11 verities, resource crises, and global change as well as to the ever-present message in being involved with the landscape around us. Indeed, while de(s)crying the world of video screens, computers, and cell phones, this reviewer looks forward to Stilgoe's more forward-looking engagement with cyberspaces, cyberplaces, and the inscapes they produce. Finally, is the mislabeling of the jacket-cover image of a High Plains settlement in 1900 as an early-19th-century view of Niagara Falls an error, or another Stilgoe device to make us think about places real and imagined? ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. B. Osborne Queen's University at Kingston

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

John R. Stilgoe, Robert and Lois Orchard Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, is the author of Outside Lies Magic, Lifeboat (Virginia), and Old Fields: Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape (Virginia).