A lively, opinionated, eminently debatable contribution to a surprisingly bitter debate.
A vivid look at a key controversy in city planning, written for a popular audience.
To Fitzgerald, a professor of medical humanities and social sciences, urban planners fixated on the idea that more green spaces makes a better city believed “there was something about our cities that was simply bad for us.” Granted, the cities into which humans began flocking after 1800 were crammed, filthy, and wildly unhealthy for anyone except the wealthy. As the century progressed, reforms and technology relieved the worst features, but even today, it remains an accepted belief that crowded cities are sinks of stress and mental illness. By the mid-19th century, planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted had the solution: bring the natural world back into to the city, “so that it was not really a city at all,” but rather a massive landscaped park with hundreds of buildings. This “garden city” remains a powerful influence, perhaps epitomized by Le Corbusier’s iconic designs, which place citizens in scattered skyscrapers among vast tracts of open land for rest and play, connected by multilane freeways to distant offices and factories. Although Fitzgerald agrees that greenery improves a city’s quality of life, he doubts that it exerts “a quasi-religious, even transcendental effect on nearby humans” and worries that “we have given too much weight to people who don’t actually like cities very much.” That “our buildings should align with complex, natural, evolutionary processes” remains a city planning mantra, and this skeptical overview gives its opponents up-to-date ammunition, although they will likely remain a minority. The classic love letter to the messy, unreformed metropolis remains Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but open-minded readers will relish many of Fitzgerald’s interesting arguments in favor of traditional city structure.
A lively, opinionated, eminently debatable contribution to a surprisingly bitter debate.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781541674509
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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