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"The Custom of the Sea" by Neil Hanson and "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick
Two new books serve up hair-raising histories of maritime cannibalism with all the gory details.
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[04/13/00]

Minds wide shut
A new book makes the CIA's Cold War skulduggery look upright compared with the self-deceptions of the intellectuals who were on the agency's payroll.
By Robert S. Boynton
[04/12/00]

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"The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living" by Martin Clark
A wild and weirdly plotted novel by and about a circuit court judge, complete with a hunt for lost loot, a murder and a convoluted trial.
By Michael Scott Moore
[04/12/00]

"Lightning on the Sun"
An excerpt from Robert Bingham's final work.
By Robert Bingham
[04/11/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Hey, big spender
My husband's monthly marijuana bills reach $500, and he refuses to save. What am I going to do about this financial disaster I married?
By Garrison Keillor
[04/11/00]

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It's no accident that "Suburban Nation" has the angry, call-to-arms tone of a manifesto; its authors have been preaching the gospel of a design philosophy known variously as New Urbanism, neotraditionalism and "traditional neighborhood development" for many years. All three work at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., the Miami design firm behind new town-scale developments such as Seaside, Fla.; Kentlands, in Gaithersburg, Md.; and Middleton Hills, in Madison, Wis. These unusually dense, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly developments remain controversial (and we'll get to that), but they have proved to be a startlingly successful alternative to the typical, space-devouring housing tracts around them. In both Seaside and Kentlands, the authors report, houses and homesites sell at a significant premium over similar, or even larger, lots in nearby conventional subdivisions.

Whatever one thinks of DPZ's solutions to sprawl, "Suburban Nation" provides a marvelously detailed critique of suburbia as it exists, a landscape most of us are intimately familiar with but few of us have thought much about. It's a place where the roads are too wide, the traffic too fast and the buildings too low and too far apart, so walking is discouraged if not forbidden. (In the rare instances when suburban planners do build sidewalks, the authors write, the empty pavement becomes "the physical embodiment of sprawl's guilty conscience," used only by indigents and stranded motorists.) Nearly identical houses cluster in enormous pods of uniform density, where vast amounts of open space are wasted in a bewildering tangle of curvilinear streets and cul-de-sacs. Titanic shopping centers sit amid vast oceans of parking; schools, hospitals, municipal buildings and other public structures are isolated on faux-rural "campuses."

All of this, needless to say, depends entirely on the private automobile, which the authors of "Suburban Nation" call "a private space as well as a potentially sociopathic device." Suburbia claims to offer its residents a choice of lifestyles, but it really offers only one: "to own a car and to need it for everything." Time spent in the car is specifically time not spent in the public realm, which has in turn been eviscerated, the authors argue, as urban planners have tried to lure car-culture suburbanites back to America's downtowns. "Interstate highways were welcomed into the city core, streets were widened and made one-way, street trees were cut down, sidewalks were narrowed or eliminated, and on-street parking was replaced by massive parking lots," they write. The result, of course, is that encounters between people of different racial and socioeconomic cadres -- precisely the encounters that define the urban experience -- become increasingly rare.

Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck write surprisingly pithy, elegant prose, and "Suburban Nation" is full of juicy insider observations drawn from the Orwellian world of suburban planning. This is a realm where traffic engineers define trees as "fixed and hazardous objects" and keep widening and multiplying highways despite ample evidence that increasing traffic capacity only makes traffic worse (because it encourages people to drive more and live farther away from their workplaces).

The obsessive single-use zoning of suburbia, stemming from the era when separating industry from housing was a crucial health issue, meticulously segregates every economic function from every other and, in particular, groups the rich, the middle class and the poor in their own homogeneous clusters. Those residents who are too poor, too young or too old to drive are subjected to virtual house arrest, while suburban parents are forced into the stereotypical multitasking "soccer mom" role.

Baxandall and Ewen are well aware that the American suburbs were founded on economic and racial segregation, and remain isolated and car dependent to an unhealthy degree. They agree with the "Suburban Nation" authors that the suburbia we see around us today resulted from highly specific decisions, and that something quite different could have been built instead. "Picture Windows" offers an account of how the private development typified by Long Island's infamous Levittown became the dominant suburban form, and it is an attempt to resurrect some defeated alternatives. Still more ambitiously, it strives to transcend anti-suburban snobbery and rehabilitate the potent dream of "a place where ordinary people, not just the elite, would have access to affordable, attractive, modern housing in communities with parks, gardens, recreation, stores and cooperative town meeting places."

As left-leaning social-science intellectuals, Baxandall and Ewen write, they "had been schooled in a tradition that celebrated urban culture and looked at the rest of America as a backwater." When both began teaching at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, in the heart of Long Island suburbia, they became aware that their surroundings were far more diverse and complicated than the familiar stereotype of "an anesthetized state of mind, a 'no place' dominated by a culture of conformity and consumption." In fact, the suburbs of Long Island were created and populated in numerous waves of 20th century migration, beginning with the Gilded Age mansions and "Gatsby"-era nouveau riche playgrounds of the North Shore and continuing to the present, when Long Island reportedly houses more Central American immigrants than New York.

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