_This Land_, Anthony Flint (kindle)

Subtitled: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America

A number of years ago, I noticed that when I read earlier books by authors I had newly discovered that I liked, their earlier books often were less and less appealing to me, even tho new ones coming out got better and better. This made sense, so I instituted a rule: read backwards until you don't like them quite as much and then stop. If I read past that point, sometimes I got so mad at the author it impaired my enjoyment of newer books.

Some time after that (but before now), I discovered an exception to that rule: Neal Stephenson. I liked _Snow Crash_, I _loved_ _Zodiac_, and succeeding novels left me cold (I liked _The Big U_, despite its flaws, but then I was out of Stephenson I was willing to take a risk on). I decided the read backwards and stop rule was really best for romances. And no, I don't have any explanation for why.

In any event, I loved _Wrestling with Moses_ so much I figured this was worth a try.

Flint surveys the ground relatively effectively: he devotes substantial space to Smart Growth, the New Urbanism, the politics of zoning and development, the impact of 9/11 on cities and large corporations, exurbs, public transit, the effect of rising fuel costs, Detroit, white flight, the isolation of the poor within some city cores and the gentrification of others (actually, the book could have stood a lot more on that topic, because at times it seemed like he treated city cores as uniformly one or the other without recognizing that that was a bit problematic). At times he digs deeper; at other times, he touches lightly and moves on.

This book was published before the 2006 elections and their numerous ballot initiatives designed to curb anti-sprawl movements, but after Oregon's three decades of urban growth boundaries took a body blow, the tone of the book is somewhat pessimistic, and treats the property rights movement as powerful. In retrospect, that either seems silly, or like a really effective bit of propaganda to get readers ratcheted up and defeat those ballot initiatives (which, with the previously mentioned exception of Arizona, did in fact happen).

While in general Flint gives enough information in the text to identify specific developments, sometimes it required a lot of googling (altho had I realized the notes were that extensive, I would have used them more). The upside of reading this book several years after publication is not unlike the upside of reading (or rereading) _Under the Banner of Heaven) was last year -- you can go find out what happened to so-and-so after the tale told in the text. Because in both cases, the subject matter is still being covered in the news, blogs, etc.

I doubt I would have read this book, had I not previously read and loved _Wrestling with Moses_. I'm sorry to say I have a couple other sprawl books in the to-read universe. Hopefully one of those will be more recommendable.

ETA: I may have given this guy too much of a pass. He says liberals aren't usually but should be hawks in the war on terror, because otherwise terrorism fears will force everyone to disperse into the countryside. Because we all saw how well the war on terror was at eliminating the impulse to attack the US. He also cites the usual suspects (Wilson, etc.) in bogus theorizing about how suburbs are evolutionarily how we are programmed to live (really, the passage has to be read to be believed but I cannot bring myself to reproduce it). Also, he seems to think parking is something that the reader should get involved in when planning rail transit stations -- which is basically completely at odds with the idea of high density, walkable development at rail transit stations.

_Transit Maps of the World_, Mark Ovenden

I've skimmed the whole thing, dipping into detail in spots and am now reading and studying in detail.

Ovenden has done something highly improbable: by collecting in one place transit maps for metros all over the world (possibly all of them, including some that haven't been implemented yet), he has produced a book which is so vastly entertaining I occasionally lost track of how much I was having to think as I paged through it.

Having ridden on some of these systems over the last 24 years or so, I got all the fun of trying to figure out which of the historic pictures/diagrams/maps was the best match for what I remembered carrying around as a tourist and/or staring at on station walls and in cars. Being a very amateurish design critic (I'm not a junkie, since so much of it repulses me), I got sucked in very quickly to the author's analysis of which kinds of maps worked well, and which other kinds of maps are tried repeatedly, even tho they have major problems. Partway through the book, I got kind of interested in what Tufte would say on the subject, and kept pestering R. for a summary, but R. didn't remember Tufte spending much time on transit diagrams/maps/pictures and got somewhat irritated at me poking at it. Neither one of us felt up to digging through the books upstairs so I resorted to google, where I quickly determined that, yes, once again, I think Tufte is largely useless. (The book includes some of Kick Designs alternate NYC diagrams, in case anyone is keeping score.)

Would anyone in their right mind carry this book on a trip with them? If someone did, I'd love to have coffee with them because I'm sure they are vastly entertaining. But that's not what this book is for. Part oooooh, cool, and I didn't know that! Part, holy crap that's a lot of tunnels. Part, wow those systems are growing fast. Part design history and criticism. Part what-is-transit-good-at. There may not be anything here for someone who can't stand leaving the woods or the desert, and has trouble convincing themselves to wear shoes, much less enter a city and ride public transit. But there's something here to amuse and enlighten just about everyone else.

Movie/documentary review: The Weather Underground (DVD)

I've had some disks out from netflix for so long it would have been much cheaper if I'd just bought them all. Oh well.

Like just about everyone who has watched this documentary and then written about it, the Weathermen and Women don't really seem all that impressive, right up until three of them die in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. Their ensuing decision to go underground and _not_ kill people (innocent or otherwise) moves them out of the just-a-bunch-of-young-idiots-making-trouble category and into more ambiguous category of being simultaneously provocative and increasingly irrelevant.

The irrelevance wasn't because their causes were not just or important -- they were just and very important. Looking at the list, it's hard not to cheer them on. But wave after wave of boomers born a few years after them were maturing and teenage cohorts go from one thing to the next about every three years, tops. By the time WU members were hitting 30, about the only people engaging with them were increasingly badly behaved FBI agents.

I knew that in the decades before sunshine laws like FOIA, documents had gotten out by being "leaked" by people who had legitimate access to them to the press. I had _not_ realized that a bunch of significant revelations were the result of activists breaking into FBI offices and then taking the documents over to newspaper offices. Wow.

The documentary covers where-are-they-now: who turned themselves in when, and of course with Ayers, Dohrn and others participating in the documentary, a fair amount of comments on terrorism now versus the bombings they engaged in then. Very entertaining to learn that when WU folk turned themselves in, the major effect was the FBI getting into huge trouble and none of the WU being successfully prosecuted (assuming I understood that part correctly -- there were some kiddie distractions).

If you get a chance to watch it, I'd highly recommend it, particularly if you were, say, to contemplate some direct action of your own. I'd say it is _extremely_ important never to cross that boundary of crimes against property to crimes against people. Crimes against property will cause The Law to lose their heads. Crimes against people galvanize everyone. Lesson learned, I guess.

Also, mid-November through the first week of December 1969 has to be one of the worst periods of bad news ever: the murder at Altamont, My Lai finally hit the news as did the Manson family. There were worse things that have happened, obviously, but for news items that just drilled middle-class American ideas of Things You Can Count on, that was a bad few weeks.