With a global view and his eyes cast skyward, Barr provides an enjoyable, expansive study of a subject he loves.
An examination of “how the trajectories of globalization and urbanization, and our evolving tastes and needs, have created the world’s skylines.”
Whether you love them or loathe them, it is hard to deny that skyscrapers define the look and feel of modern cities. Barr, a professor of economics who has been studying skyscrapers for many years, has a great affection for them. In this follow-up to Building the Skyline, the author looks at both the history and the current landscape, emphasizing the link between the buildings and the social environment in which they exist. In the 20th century, skyscrapers were largely an American phenomenon, with the Empire State Building being the embodiment of the idea for decades after it opened in 1931. Others would follow in the postwar era, reflecting the confidence of the time. Architects love them as a chance to strut their creative stuff, but the property developers always have an eye on profitability. Skyscrapers, in fact, generally turn out to be good investments. In the 21st century, the focus of the business has moved to Asia, home to 9 of the 10 tallest buildings in the world. Five are in mainland China, but there are also some remarkable examples in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia. The trend is to mix corporate offices with residential, retail, and recreational space. The prize for the most ambitious effort probably goes to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, “the current world’s tallest building.” Construction at this level involves huge technical problems, but innovative designs and new building methods are pointing toward the next generation. “The engineering know-how to create a one-mile structure…is here,” Barr writes, continuing, “[I]f history is any guide, the journey will remain ever upward.”
With a global view and his eyes cast skyward, Barr provides an enjoyable, expansive study of a subject he loves.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781982174217
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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