Armed with a self-proclaimed mission to “sleuth” American ground (“to understand the change in landscape form and meaning and what it could tell us about ourselves as a society now”), Lessard embarks on numerous journeys, described in the series of essays that make up The Absent Hand. Destinations range from her home village of Rensselaerville, New York, and the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg to King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

On Election Day, Arizona remained a red state -- electing Sheriff Joe Arpaio to a sixth term in office, Republican Jeff Flake to the U.S. Senate, and voting for Mitt Romney for president -- while its neighbors, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, went blue for President Obama. According to political pundits, the reason those states voted Democrat this year was because of their fast-growing Latino populations. If having a large Latino population was all a state needed to turn blue, then Arizona, which is almost one-third Latino, should have been blue, too. But it wasn’t.