An engrossing examination of parking and the many other issues that intersect with it.
A deep dive into how the complex rules of parking are affecting us all and what we can do about it.
Grabar, a staff writer for Slate who covers housing, transportation, and urban policy, introduces us to the issues surrounding parking with an example that begins with a dispute and ends with assault and arrest. “You may feel…shocked to learn that disputes over parking spaces can and do lead to violence,” he writes. “In a few dozen incidents each year, they even lead to death.” Examining the development of cultural rules involved with parking (not all of them are actually laws), the author illuminates a variety of related, interconnected issues, including the nation’s lack of low-income housing; how the downtown cores of major cities are effectively blocked from development due to efforts to increase parking areas; and how parking and urban development rules are being manipulated to aid money laundering, tax evasion, and theft. Grabar investigates the problems from the points of view of housing developers, architects, parking enforcement officers, garage owners, city councils, app developers, and analysts and consultants who think they have solutions. The author highlights both success stories and failures—e.g., when the city of Chicago signed away the rights to their own parking meters to a Wall Street firm for a century, costing the city billions of dollars in unexpected costs. Although we all understand what ideal parking means—“immediately available, directly in front of our destination, and most important, free”—attempting to figure out where it exists and who is responsible can be overwhelming. "Parking lies at the intersection of transportation and land use, a bastard field of study shunned by both architects and traffic engineers,” writes the author, who proves to be an adept guide to this knotty topic.
An engrossing examination of parking and the many other issues that intersect with it.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781984881137
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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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