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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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