"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 Flight Maps charts the ways in which Americans have historically made-and missed-connections with nature. Rather than lighting out for the wild places, Price examines the ways in which we have brought nature into our homes and suburban communities. What place does nature occupy in our hearts and minds? To answer that deceptively simple question, Price sifts through "landscapes" and artifacts as diverse as eighteenth-century cookbooks, dinner menus, the Mall of America, and John Waters movies and ruminates on everything from the extreme popularity of The Nature Company and "Northern Exposure" to the plastic pink flamingo, simultaneously the totem of artifice and kitsch and a potent symbol of our problematic vision of nature. Witty and whimsical, Flight Maps is a sophisticated meditative archaeology of Americans' desire to make nature meaningful in their lives.