Author: John R. Stilgoe 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 isnt only a rarity; he or she is suspect. Landscape and Images records a lifetime spent observing Americas constructed landscapes. Stilgoes 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. Stilgoes observations speak to specialistswhether they be artists, historians, or environmental designersas well as to the common reader. Our landscapes constitute a fascinating history of accident and intent. The proof, says Stilgoe, is all around us.

Author: Frederic Svoboda The winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (19322009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nations life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the authors deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended close readings of Updikes most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood. A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewiss earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthornes nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number-one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called the adulterous society in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nations fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updikes professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nationnot only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.