An intellectually and visually stimulating guide to the kind of development that restores, rather than paves over, America’s...
Good planning and rehabbing can give old buildings and cities new leases on life, argues this savvy manifesto on urban redevelopment.
Cort, a California real estate developer, specializes in buying distressed, decrepit old houses and buildings in bad parts of town, remodeling them with modern amenities while preserving their historic ambiance, and then renting or selling them for a profit. The result, he argues, is a thriving business model that also helps jump-start residential and commercial revitalization in blighted neighborhoods. He spotlights a number of his projects in the struggling city of Stockton, California, and the coastal town of Pacific Grove, which run the gamut: spruced-up Victorians, a renovated apartment building with ground-floor businesses that create an “urban village,” an abandoned factory that becomes a social services center, a derelict office building turned into a law library, an initiative to get municipal electricity from solar panels, etc. The subject of real estate development can be dry, but Cort manages to make his accounts of these projects both lucid and interesting as he explains aspects of creative financing for properties that lenders often see as bad investments or tax and subsidy concerns. Renovating to building code can be challenging, he says, though good tenants will enhance a building’s value; there’s also the consideration of selecting public art to be on display within the building. Along the way, Cort explains his urbanist and preservationist philosophies of redevelopment, which owe much to Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler; he decries the sprawl that sucks businesses and tax base away from downtowns to the exurbs, and he extols the sustainability, liveliness and community values of dense, mixed-use inner-city districts. (The book’s many color photos of his projects show their considerable charm to good advantage.) Brimming with ideas and expert insights, Cort’s introduction to the subject of preservationist development will appeal to real estate professionals, planners, activists and anyone who cherishes neglected architectural treasures.
An intellectually and visually stimulating guide to the kind of development that restores, rather than paves over, America’s civic tradition.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1935530015
Page Count: 186
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
