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 Flight MapsAdventures With Nature In Modern Americaby Jennifer Price Apr 5, 2000
DescriptionIn five sharply drawn chapters, Flight Maps charts the ways in which Americans have historically made connections—and missed connections—with nature. Beginning with an extraordinary chapter on the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and the accompanying belligerent early view of nature’s inexhaustibility, Price then moves on to discuss the Audubon Society’s founding campaign in the 1890s against the extravagant use of stuffed birds to decorate women’s hats. At the heart of the book is an improbable and extremely witty history of the plastic pink flamingo, perhaps the totem of Artifice and Kitsch—nevertheless a potent symbol through which to plumb our troublesome yet powerful visions of nature. From here the story of the affluent Baby-Boomers begins. Through an examination of the phenomenal success of The Nature Company, TV series such as Northern Exposure and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and the sport-utility vehicle craze, the author ruminates on our very American, very urbanized and suburbanized needs, discontents, and desires for meaningful, yet artificially constructed connections to nature. Witty, at times even whimsical, Flight Maps is also a sophisticated and meditative archaeology of Americans’ very real and uneasy desire to make nature meaningful in their lives. Reviews
"Price's willingness to engage with natural phenomena anywhere she finds them is a refreshing change."
"Flight Maps will provoke and excite you.…Humor, self-scrutiny and a passion for ideas light up [its] pages."
“Unlike most nature writers, Jenny Price follows her birds not into the wild, but into the malls, restaurants, and suburban lawns where Americans give them meaning and often determine their fate. Funny, compassionate, and wonderfully written, Flight Maps soars far above the pedestrian nature writing so evident these days.” "How can you not like a nature book with a chapter on plastic pink flamigos? And an essay on the metaphors in Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks? This well-researched and — dare I say it? — funny book is a delight for scholars, nature lovers, and neophytes alike." “Flight Maps is a stunning debut performance by a writer who will surely make her mark in years to come. Loosely categorized as environmental history, it is, in fact, a deep—and deeply disturbing—meditation on the significance of Nature in modern times. Ingenious in research, and enormously clever in argument, it qualifies too as literature. And it makes history important as few such books ever do.” "Flight Maps is a benchmark in our understanding of American attitudes toward nature. Jennifer Price writes with keen insight, wry wit, and easy grace, and has produced a superb book. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about the complex and contradictory ways our lives connect with the natural world " Selling TerritoryWorld Excluding UK & Commonwealth |
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