The ideal companion for city buffs, who’ll come away seeing the streets in an entirely different light.
A user-friendly guide to all the overlooked things that make urban civilization tick.
If you’re an infrastructure nerd, a reader of David Macauley, Kate Ascher, or Brian Hayes, then you know that under the sidewalks of your town or city lies an endlessly complex world of pipes, cables, wires, and tunnels. If you want to understand the language spoken in that world, then this book is for you. Building from their popular podcast of the same name, Mars and Kohlstedt explore the occult grammar of the city, much of it hiding in plain sight. What are those boxes at eye level that you see on so many buildings? Well, “firefighters essentially have a skeleton key that opens all of the boxes in their area.” Within a “Knox box” is in turn a copy of the master key for any given building. How is it that one can breathe inside New York City’s Holland Tunnel, which burrows under the Hudson River? The authors explain the process and note that when it was built, using air shafts and aboveground ventilation towers, the air quality in the tunnel was better than that out on the street, adding, “to be fair, that is setting quite a low bar.” Numerous other urban elements are grist for the authors’ amiably churning mill: Those metal stars on the fronts of old brick buildings are the ends of truss rods that prevent the walls from sagging; things are named as they are via complex bureaucratic interactions; the pedestrian-friendly city that allows e-scooters becomes less pedestrian-friendly. Mars and Kohlstedt operate without an agenda other than to share their enthusiasm for urban design (“You can learn so much from reading sidewalk markings—especially when they’re spelled right”), and there’s a pleasant and useful lesson on every page.
The ideal companion for city buffs, who’ll come away seeing the streets in an entirely different light.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-12660-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
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
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