Deep thinking about cities.
A history as well as a philosophical examination of humanity’s belief in progress and a better future as demonstrated in the spread of urbanization.
Carvalho, professor at Harvard, author of Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro, writes that just a few centuries ago everyone believed that divine forces governed the universe, everything worth knowing was known, and the future would resemble the past. Matters changed during the Renaissance. As a historian put it, “The future would be different from the past, and better, to boot.” By the mid-18th century, the expectation that humans had the capacity to make new futures and shape their own destinies had taken hold. Carvalho opens with the catastrophic 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent rebuilding under autocratic guidance, partly frustrated (as usual) by property owners and tradition but which resulted in features heralding a new vision of progress: fewer monumental structures, wider streets (for fire prevention, not traffic), and an obsession with a grid layout as opposed to the old tangled pattern of streets. The iconic 1811 Manhattan grid established an even more radically modern relationship between planning and urban life: less religiously charged, and more open-ended. New York’s transformation in the 19th century exemplified transatlantic urbanization as a laboratory for social stratification, identity formation, and creativity. That was not part of the plan, but planners always underestimated how much cities would evolve within a few generations. Most readers recall the brutal Haussmann mid-19th-century transformation of Paris and L’Enfant’s dazzling 1791 plan for Washington D.C., but Carvalho, a Brazilian, pays more than usual attention to great South American cities as he delves into urbanization across the world from Delhi to Berlin to San Francisco and across Africa. Prediction is a mug’s game, so Carvalho confines his conclusion to heralding the long-delayed death of car worship and noting the movement of imaginative urban development to Asia.
Deep thinking about cities.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780691246550
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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