Lucy Lippard's The Lure of the Local is a multidimensional consideration of our contemporary sense of place. Set in the varied American landscape and reflecting the peripatetic nature of our history and culture (the multicentered), this is a very "American" book. Lippard's insightful and inclusive description of American locales and our place in them, however, broadens the concept from a more traditional reading of a predictable community to a fluid, open analysis of the notion of physical, social, and cultural belonging. The work moves forward exploring the relationship between this sense of identity with particular places and a connection to an expanded society and a larger nature.

The Lure of the Local is a dense treasure of ideas, illuminating the power of place on our psyches, histories, memories, and unfolding the realities of how experience and familiarity with "home" pushes and pulls us throughout our lives. Serving as an anthology of cultural thought about land/place/home and the meanings it holds for us, the book is liberally laced with quotes from diverse sources including Genesis, Estella Conwill Majozo, an anonymous Vietnamese immigrant, and Robert Smithson, on topics ranging from public housing to the identifying signs in national parks.

In the way that no experience is a direct route but a series of perceptions and overlays of the personal, communal, and historical, Lippard's book manifests that multileveled process in the book's contents, presentation, and design. One layer is Lippard's own journal, formatted as an italicized runner at the top of every page, narrating experiences in her lifetime of summering at the family home in Maine. Another is the main critical text and commentary of the book, exploring the landscape and issues of place from various perspectives (chapter titles include "Around Here", "Manipulating Memory", "Down to Earth: Land Use", "The Last Frontiers: City and Suburbs", among others). A third significant element is the thread of landscape and place-related works by contemporary artists that Lippard weaves throughout the volume. These are illustrated with photographs, and accompanied by Lippard's extensive captions discussing the artists, the works and how they offer new vision to the crucial issues examined.

In the end, The Lure of the Local exemplifies the depth of complexity the author believes is needed for art to effectively interact with society. Lippard has created a work that attempts itself to be what, in conclusion, she calls for stimulating "art governed by the place ethic" to be: specific to people's own lived experiences, collaborative, generous and open-ended, appealing and memorable, simple and familiar, as well as layered, complex and unfamiliar, evocative, provocative, and critical.

Leah Levy is an independent art curator in Berkeley, California. Her most recent book is Kathryn Gustafson: Sculpting the Land.