An informative introduction to supertalls and the global cities where they rise above the skyline.
An architect and urban designer reflects on the technological innovations that have enabled the construction of “supertalls” and on the advances in urbanism that help mitigate their environmental shortcomings.
Al, the author of The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, is highly knowledgeable about his subject, even if he is conflicted. He claims that “tall buildings are an integral part of urban living for the future” but describes supertalls—skyscrapers that exceed 300 meters in height—as “gas-guzzling Hummers on steroids” and “makers of increased inequity and societal risk.” While shorter skyscrapers “have significant environmental benefits,” buildings like the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, One57 in New York City, the Shanghai Tower, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (the world’s tallest building) mostly create environmental costs and “alienate people from nature.” Ostensibly made necessary by urban densities that send land values soaring, supertalls only became feasible with technological advances in structural material (especially, high-performance concrete); building shapes that dampen sway and lessen the vortexes created by high winds; safer and faster elevators that ease vertical movement; and innovations in air conditioning that compensate for inoperable windows and expansive glass facades. Technology, Al proposes, is also the solution to the environmental and urban problems generated by supertalls. Green infrastructure, mass transit, passive solar design, and zoning that allows for mixed-use districts are just a few of his recommendations. Yet, further expressing his ambivalence, the author writes, “technological progress doesn’t always lead to human progress.” Consequently, when he announces that “we are witnessing another golden age…the era of ‘supertalls,’ ” some readers may be unconvinced. Although he addresses a wide array of topics, Al could have written more about the financial feasibility of supertalls, the architectural design challenges they pose, the experiences of users, and the impacts these buildings have on surrounding residential and office markets.
An informative introduction to supertalls and the global cities where they rise above the skyline.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-00641-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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