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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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