Suburban Books - Page 2

Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County since World War II

Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, Mark Poster

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Editorial Review:

Neither a city nor a traditional suburb, Orange County, California represents a striking example of a new kind of social formation. This multidisciplinary volume offers a cogent case study of the "postsuburban" phenomenon.

American Dreamscape: The Pursuit of Happiness in Post-War Suburbia

Tom Martinson

List Price: $26.00 By: Carroll & Graf Publishers Amazon Marketplace: 29 new & used starting at $0.01

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Filmmakers, novelists, social critics, environmentalists - they all decry suburbia, and the myths of mindless conformity uncontrolled sprawl, decentralisation, and cultural blight continue to grow. But so do the suburbs. In a phenomenon unparalleled in the social history of modern, postwar America, more than 138,000,000 Americans-the majority of our national population-now live in suburbs; for the most part, happily. And Tom Martinson, a city planner whose fieldwork for this book has taken him to more than a hundred communities throughout the United States, has discovered why. Whereas recent titles have attracted media. attention for their indictments of suburbia as an American nightmare, this lucid, incisive volume displays conclusively that the suburbs, which are no less various than they are ubiquitous, defy the stereotypes of urbanist critics. Separating biases that characterise suburban communities as vacuous, wasteful, centreless places from their actuality, Martinson traces the evolution of suburbs over the past two centuries, examines the values that challenge and unsettle the urbanists, investigates charges that government unfairly favours suburbs over cities, and considers possibilities for the future development of suburbia. Martinson knows the issues, and asks some billion-dollar questions. He also has illuminating answers as well as copious elucidating photographs of suburbs across the country to support them, as with vision, wit, and historical perspective he surveys the wars on one of Americas premier cultural battleground.

The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860

Henry C. Binford

List Price: $16.95 By: Univ of Chicago Pr (T) Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $2.43

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Why Animals Sleep So Close to the Road (and Other Lies I Tell My Children)

Susan Konig

List Price: $22.95 By: Thomas Dunne Books Amazon Marketplace: 35 new & used starting at $0.01

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Susan Konig's warm, witty, and all-true story of becoming a work-from-home suburban mother--think Erma Bombeck meets I Don't Know How She Does It--is winning and laugh-out-loud funny.

Lifelong city dwellers, the Konig family can barely turn around in an apartment that seems to shrink with each addition. With baby #3 on the way, their home is nearing the bursting point. But it's the smallest inhabitants, a bold group of mice who don't mind living with four humans and a cat, who finally push the family to seek larger quarters, an adorable bungalow with a backyard and attic space, in the 'burbs.

Trading mice for a too-friendly local skunk, the family settles in and discovers the unexpected joys and trials of owning a home (prone to sewer backup), driving a minivan (mobile Cheerios repository), and raising three small children (countless sticky adventures). As they learn the local customs--how to respond after backing into a neighbor's car, when to expect a twenty-four-hour plumber to be actually on call, how much to clean before the cleaning lady comes--Susan Konig recounts her domestic adventures with equal doses of widsom and charm.

Honed by years as a journalist, Susan Konig's eye for detail reveals the charm and humor in the everyday situations that await her. Her story will make suburban dwellers laugh in recognition, while city dwellers count their blessings.

A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb

Philip Langdon

Amazon Price: $24.95 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of Massachusetts Press Amazon Marketplace: 35 new & used starting at $4.31

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A highly praised critique of the modern suburb What is it about modern American suburbs that has led to so much dissatisfaction? How has the typical suburban design of the past fifty years exacerbated the stress of daily life, and what better alternatives can be found? Philip Langdon crisscrossed the country to see how suburbs are being built and to interview designers, developers, planners, and residents. The first results of his research were published in a cover story in the Atlantic. Since then, he has broadened his analysis to create this well-illustrated and highly readable book. "American suburbs foster social isolation, dependence on the automobile, long commutes, and segregation of land use, thereby contributing to family distress and urban decay. That damning verdict by Langdon ... informs a much-needed visionary critique of suburban planning and life-styles.... Compelling reading for those concerned with the declining quality of life, his well-illustrated analysis will serve as a sourcebook for planners, architects, builders, and designers". -- Publishers Weekly "An excellent journalistic study of the 'neo-traditional' approach to town planning, which seeks to build suburbs designed deliberately to foster some of the oft-celebrated qualities of small towns: next-door neighbors who know each other, local gathering places where strangers can converse freely, attractive public spaces that encourage foot traffic". -- Wall Street Journal

Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney's Brave New Town

Douglas Frantz, Catherine Collins

List Price: $25.00 By: Henry Holt and Co. Amazon Marketplace: 53 new & used starting at $0.12

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Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A prize-winning reporter, his wife, and their two kids describe life in Disney's vision of the future.

In 1997, six months after the first residents had moved into Celebration, Florida-Disney's town of the future with its distinctly retro link to a longed-for past-Doug and Cathy and their two kids closed on their new home and settled down to participate in (and observe) this new venture. Their report from the trenches will surprise both Disney haters and Disney fans.

What is it like to start a new community-not a suburb or subdivision, but a town, inted to be a self-supporting community with the best of the new technologies (including the very latest in teaching techniques) and the most cherished elements in American towns that existed before the automobile turned everything into a mall? For almost two years the family lived this experiment firsthand. Their report is vivid, funny, and painful-and it tells us as much about ourselves and our hopes and dreams as it does about the daily reality of building a community from the ground up.

Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History

Michael H. Ebner

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Editorial Review:

They are the suburban jewels that crown one of the world's premier cities. Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff: together, they comprise the North Shore of Chicago, a social registry of eight communities that serve as a genteel enclave of affluence, culture, and high society. Historian Michael H. Ebner explains the origins and evolution of the North Shore as a distinctive region. At the same time, he tells the paradoxical story of how these suburbs, with their common heritage, mutual values, and shared aspirations, still preserve their distinctly separate identities. Embedded in this history are important lessons about the uneasy development of the American metropolis.

The Moral Order of a Suburb

M. P. Baumgartner

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Editorial Review:

Surrounding all major cities in the United States are numerous smaller communities collectively known as suburbia. The most popular place of residence in America, the suburbs are peaceful and tranquil environments, where civility prevails and disturbances of the peace are uncommon. Drawing on research, observation, and hundreds of in-depth interviews conducted during a twelve-month study of an affluent New York City suburb, M.P. Baumgartner reveals that the apparent serenity of the suburb is caused by the avoidance of open conflict. She contends that although nonviolence, nonconfrontation, and tolerance produce a superficial social harmony, these behaviors arise from disintegrative tendencies in modern culture--transience, fragmentation, weak family and communal ties, isolation, and indifference--conditions customarily viewed as sources of disorder, antagonism, and violence. A kind of moral minimalism pervades the suburbs, a disorganized social order that, with the suburbs' rapid growth in America, promises to be the moral order of the future. A valuable contribution to the literature on social control, this study of conflict management should attract general readers and scholars alike.

Knocking on the Door: The Federal Government's Attempt to Desegregate the Suburbs

Christopher Bonastia

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Editorial Review:

Knocking on the Door is the first book-length work to analyze federal involvement in residential segregation from Reconstruction to the present. Providing a particularly detailed analysis of the period 1968 to 1973, the book examines how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) attempted to forge elementary changes in segregated residential patterns by opening up the suburbs to groups historically excluded for racial or economic reasons. The door did not shut completely on this possibility until President Richard Nixon took the drastic step of freezing all federal housing funds in January 1973. Knocking on the Door assesses this near-miss in political history, exploring how HUD came surprisingly close to implementing rigorous antidiscrimination policies, and why the agency's efforts were derailed by Nixon.

Christopher Bonastia shows how the Nixon years were ripe for federal action to foster residential desegregation. The period was marked by new legislative protections against housing discrimination, unprecedented federal involvement in housing construction, and frequent judicial backing for the actions of civil rights agencies.

By comparing housing desegregation policies to civil rights enforcement in employment and education, Bonastia offers an unrivaled account of why civil rights policies diverge so sharply in their ambition and effectiveness.

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

List Price: $35.00 By: North Point Press Amazon Marketplace: 32 new & used starting at $6.75

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Total reviews: 84 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A manifesto by America's most controversial and celebrated town planners, proposing an alternative model for community design.

There is a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and to replace the automobile-based settlement patterns of the past fifty years with a return to more traditional planning principles. This movement stems not only from the realization that sprawl is ecologically and economically unsustainable but also from a growing awareness of sprawl's many victims: children, utterly dependent on parental transportation if they wish to escape the cul-de-sac; the elderly, warehoused in institutions once they lose their driver's licenses; the middle class, stuck in traffic for two or more hours each day.

Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of this movement, and in Suburban Nation they assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. It is a lively, thorough, critical lament, and an entertaining lesson on the distinctions between postwar suburbia-characterized by housing clusters, strip shopping centers, office parks, and parking lots-and the traditional neighborhoods that were built as a matter of course until mid-century. It is an indictment of the entire development community, including governments, for the fact that America no longer builds towns. Most important, though, it is that rare book that also offers solutions.