After the suburbanization of America in the 50's, when people followed new highways out to new one-family homes, came the malling of America in the 60's and 70's and then, in the 80's, the high- rise office buildings that brought the jobs suburb-ward and added critical mass to dozens of ``urban'' clumps now bigger than many of the major old cities they surround. Today more people commute to work along the edge than into the old downtowns. Garreau (The Nine Nations of North America, 1981) devotes separate chapters to different ``Edge City'' regions, using them as springboards to tackle several issues. Among these are the restriction of civil liberties where the village center, as in New Jersey's Bridgewater township, is a privately owned mall; the enforced conformity in residential communities like those near Phoenix that are run by a corporation rather than a municipal government; the complications of race and class around Atlanta; the conflicts between developers' ideas of highest and best use and preservationists' devotion to sacred sites, as in the newest battle at Bull Run in Virginia. In general, Garreau approves the Edge City trend, which he justifies with a simplistic market-capitalist assumption that if that's where people are, then that's what people want. He pretty much ignores, to name just two major counterarguments, the effects of federal spending policies that favor highways over inner cities, and the wants of the people left behind or deliberately excluded from the Edge facilities. Even on issues he does consider, such as quality of life and culture on the Edge or developers' motives for building, he avoids much hard evidence and harder questions. Still, a provocative work that brings to popular attention a major restructuring that is, as Garreau says, all around us but largely ignored by professional architects and planners.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-26249-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
A children's rights activist's devastating account of the violence and destitution in her own life, which eventually led her to work with bui doi, the street children of Ho Chi Minh City. Noble, with the help of journalist Coram (Caribbean Time Bomb, 1993), describes a childhood in Ireland tormented by her father's alcoholism and neglect, her mother's death, sexual abuse from a relative, and experiences as a street child and in Ireland's harshest girls' reformatory. In her late teens she fled to England, where she endured 14 years in a physically and emotionally abusive marriage. After a breakdown, she left her husband, went into therapy, remarried, started a successful catering business, and, in a dream, realized that she was destined to work with children in Vietnam. In 1989, after her own three children were grown, she went to Ho Chi Minh City. She raised money to build a medical and social center for an orphanage there and to start her own foundation to help street children. Written with painful precision and clarity, the accounts of Noble's own suffering are disturbing and illuminate the source of her empathy for the desperate. But at times the narrative of her adult life is vague and tentative; her children emerge as sympathetic but flat characters, as do individual Vietnamese children. Similarly, she glosses over the end of her second marriage, blandly noting that her husband ``found someone else.'' Toward the end of the book, Noble lapses into trite humanitarian rhetoric, declaring, for instance, that ``we must heal each other like brothers and sisters.'' Such strategies of detachment read oddly, especially given the honesty and intimacy with which Noble has disclosed the emotional hardship of her younger years. Despite some holes, a heartbreaking story of a woman's survival and triumph against terrible odds. (First printing of 35,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8021-1551-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
British journalist Phillips (Until They Are Five, not reviewed, etc.) takes an inconsistent and often confusing approach to the subject of raising sons. Phillips argues that while women in the past 25 years have made great strides in moving beyond the confines of home and adapting to the demands of the outside world, men have not taken commensurate steps toward becoming part of family life. Consequently, many boys are still raised with absent, inattentive, or violent fathers or without any sort of father figures at all. Indeed, most boys, despite their mothers' efforts, have few role models for communicative, expressive, well-adjusted manhood. Though, happily, this volume is largely free of the nauseating smugness implied by the subtitle, it does have other weaknesses. Many of Phillips's seemingly authoritative and provocative statements are illogical or unsupported; she writes, for instance, that ``these days, little girls have no real reason to envy boys.'' (Many obvious considerations, ranging from discriminatory sports education to high rates of sexual abuse among female children make this a dubious statement.) Worse still, she presents many of her statistics in a confusing, ambiguous way that makes them hard to interpret; for example, she refers to some studies done in the United Kingdom, but often she doesn't specify which country she's talking about, and many of her pronouncements are unsupported by reference to specific studies. Anecdotal evidence is similarly often vague and murky; in one instance she states that a child is East African, then later identifies the same boy as Asian without any explanation. Robert Coles offers a blandly laudatory foreword. Phillips raises some crucial questions for parents of sons, but, disappointingly, this book is too scattered to explore them adequately.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-08734-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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