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 revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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