AFNY home page
Updated:
Oct 19, 2008.
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Recent Books
Sure, it's great to be a transit/auto-free activist! You go to and speak out at meetings, rallies, think-tanks and do-tanks. You support transit advocate groups, you write letters and vote, you use public transportation, walk or bike. But at the same time it's crucial to grow an intellectual framework in the background to support your work, and that's where reading comes in. (Please be sure to support your local independent bookseller, if you can still find one.)
Unfortunately, many of the books on this list have been market-censored out of existence by NYC's establishment media and corporate chain-bookstores; and though NYC's public libraries may stock thousands of new trash novel, sci-fi and cookbook titles on their shelves, they somehow seem to have overlooked some of these titles - or they may have just a single copy in their collection, buried somewhere in an obscure branch library; the title is on "permanent hold", or "in transit", or "lost", to serve a city of more than 7 million.
With some 300 new book titles being published every day, this list does not pretend, of course, to be complete - it is just a tiny few of the many, many books available today about New York, urban planning, transit, our worsening car-caused crises, etc. The books are shown in most recent publication date order, and comments or reviews are kept as brief as possible, because we know you're busy organizing. The lack of any review here should not reflect positively or negatively on any book:
Books from 2008:
CENTRAL PARK IN THE DARK: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife
by Marie Winn, Farrar, Straus Giroux, $25, 304pp.
Most New Yorkers have little contact with the natural world and lots of contact with merchandising, corporate propaganda, shrubbery, pigeons, litter, hipsters and speeding cars. So it's no wonder that such a book would appear, detailing the marvelous wildlife that manages to live in Central Park. Ms. Winn was formerly a nature columnist for the Wall Street Journal (a bit of an oxymoron occupation?) and writes vividly as a field biologist about moths, owls, hawks, raccoons, etc. She includes a history of automobile traffic in the park.
Books from 2007:
AS THE WORLD BURNS: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial
by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan, Seven Stories Press, $14.95 paperback.
A graphic novel decrying tokenism and naivete in green consumerism while advocating more substantive environmental activism.
THE WORLD WITHOUT US
by Alan Weisman, St. Martin's $24.95.
[Being reviewed.]
BLESSED UNREST: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
by Paul Hawken, Viking Press, $24.95, 342 pp.
Author Hawken, founder of the gardening chain Smith & Hawken, looks at the global grassroots environmental activist movement, which he estimates at about 2 million organizations. "Sustainability, ensuring the future of life on earth, is an infinite game, the endless expression of generosity on behalf of all," he writes. Mainstream corporate public relations, of which Americans are utterly awash, would have us believe the exact opposite.
ARCHITECTURE OF THE ABSURD: How "Genius" Disfigured a Practical Art
by John Silber, Quantuck Lane Press, $27.50, 128 pp.
Silber examines "starchitects" and the absurdist, often dysfunctional buildings they have made, both here and abroad. Silber writes from his 25-years experience as (the often controversial) president of Boston University, during which time he oversaw a building program of over 13 million square feet. Here in NYC we have NY Times architecture critic Nicholai Ouroussoff, who frequently cheerleads the monstrously oversized eyesores going up despite community opposition.
BY THE EL: Third Avenue and its El at Mid-Century
by Larry Stelter, 2nd edition, $19.95, 132pp, paperback.
Now in an updated and expanded second edition, this loving tribute to Manhattan's Third Avenue El, torn down in 1955, is based on Mr. Stelter's father's extensive color photo collection of the elevated train line he took while it was still in use. This edition updates the out of print 1995 hardcover with a new Bronx section with 18 new El photos; digitised, corrected vintage photographs; new track schematics, and essays by officials from the Transit Museum and the Bronx Historical Society. Available at the New York Transit Museum shops in Grand Central Terminal and at 130 Livingston St., Brooklyn, or in better bookshops, or by the internet, at www.bytheel.com.
THE DOWN-TO-EARTH GUIDE TO GLOBAL WARMING [Childrens' book, Ages 8 and up]
by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon, Scholastic Books, $15.99, 112pp.
OLD PENN STATION [Childrens' book, Ages 5 to 9]
by William Low, Holt, $16.95.
TRANSIT MAPS OF THE WORLD
by Mark Ovenden, Penguin Books, $25.
NEW YORK CALLING: From Blackout to Bloomberg
edited by Marshall Berman and Brian Berger, Reaktion Books, $25, 400pp.
A collection of 28 essays and numerous photos put together by Marshall Berman, a City College professor, and Brian Berger, a journalist and photographer.
WATCHING THE TRAFFIC GO BY: Transportation and Isolation in Urban America
by Paul Mason Fotsch, Univ. of Texas Press, $22.95 paperback, 272 pp.
OIL ON THE BRAIN: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline
by Lisa Margonelli, Talese Books, $26, 324 pp.
Books from 2006:
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
by Al Gore, Rodale Press, $21.95.
Perhaps the year's most important book (and movie), written by the former vice president and winner of the 2000 Presidential election by 500,000 votes. An essential primer on drastic climate change with much popular appeal, this book and movie instantly made life much more difficult for all the industry-financed paid liars in the global warming denial community.
HOW TO LIVE WELL WITHOUT A CAR
by Chris Balish, Ten Speed Press, $?, 216 pp.
THIS LAND: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America
by Anthony Flint, Johns Hopkins Univ., $24.95, 288pp.
Reviewer Chuck Leddy (Oct 2 '06 Boston Globe) says this book "offers a provocative and insightful overview of the challenges of sprawl"; the author "goes inside the backlash against the smart growth movement, showing how developers, builders and conservative think tanks joined together to attack anti-sprawl initiatives."
BIOGRAPHY OF A TENEMENT HOUSE IN NYC: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street
by Andrew S. Dolkart, Univ. of Virginia Press, $27.50, 160 pp.
GRAND ILLUSION: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11
by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, HarperCollins.
This book is meant to pick up where Mr. Barrett's first book on Giuliani, RUDY! An Investigative biography of Rudolph Giuliani (Basic Books, hardcover, 498pp), left off, in spring 2000.
Books from 2005:
THE LONG EMERGENCY: Surviving the End of the Oil Age
by James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly Press, $23, 307 pp.
AMERICA'S MAYOR: The Hidden History of Rudy Giuliani's New York
edited by Robert Polner, with preface by Jimmy Breslin, Soft Skull Press, $16, 186pp.
Gives the alternate view of Mayor Giuliani rather than that advanced by the accepted establishment hagiographer, center-right-wing Professor Fred Siegel, who soft-pedals Giuliani's disgraceful record in his 2005 book Prince of the City. See also below, in Books from 1999, Evan Mandery's book The Campaign.
HIKING LONG ISLAND
by Lee McAllister, New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, $19.99.
Think Globally, Hike Locally! Yes, Long Island has many ugly auto-dependent sprawl suburbs and perma-blighted downtowns, but this guidebook, written by a veteran hiker and Island native, acquaints you with its less-known but extensive trail network, most of which is easily accessible from Queens. This book can help you avoid that long and demoralizing automobile ride through some of the nation's ugliest automobile slums -a ride necessary when you want to get away from NYC and visit the natural planet. Also worth investigating on Long Island is Sustainable Long Island, a Bethpage-based non-profit working to revitalize Nassau and Suffolk Counties' auto-sodden, brownfield-riddled sprawl.
NEWS INCORPORATED: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy
edited by Elliot D. Cohen, Prometheus Books, $26.
102 MINUTES: the Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, Henry Holt and Times Books, $26.
It seems there will always be books popular and promoted in the US that enable American readers to wallow in feelings of victimhood. This book is no exception, even though more recent events like the grisly quagmire of post-US invasion Iraq and the torture scandals at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other concentration camps should remind Americans that we actually have it pretty easy. The NY Times ran two reviews of this book - one got it, one didn't. The one who got it was by Kevin Baker, who wrote in his Jan. 21, 2005 review that the book makes clear the twin towers were essentially a deathtrap in the event of a big fire, this had been long known, and Mayor Giuliani and his cronies were too busy strutting around making plans to make lots of money and rule the world, rather than doing their job -- which was to ensure that our emergency services were coordinated, properly equipped and, in a city jammed with skyscrapers, able to deal with any potential high-rise fires, particularly in the twin towers, which had been attacked before and were explicitly the subject of repeated threats. The other NY Times reviewer, James B. Stewart, writing in the Sunday Book Review (Jan. 9, 2005), just didn't get it.
Books from 2004:
GHOSTS OF 42nd STREET: A History of America's Most Infamous Block
by Anthony Bianco, Wm. Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.
This book focuses on the checkered history of a single block in NYC - 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. Being reviewed now to see if it has even a single mention of the massive trolley proposal that took place in the '90s but was torpedoed as soon as Giuliani took office. Bianco is a senior writer at BusinessWeek, which could explain the market censorship.
A FIELD GUIDE TO SPRAWL
by Dolores Hayden, W.W. Norton, $24.95, 128pp.
Some 75 aerial photos commissioned by the author help to spotlight America's wasteful sprawl spawned where greed and ignorance meet automobile-only development and failed government. Such aspects as boomburbs, zoomburbs, privatopias and ball porks join more well-known types as snout houses and McMansions.
THE SUBWAY AND THE CITY: Celebrating a Century
by Stan Fischler, Merriwell Inc., $39.95.
AMERICA'S OIL WARS
by Stephen Pelletiere, Praeger Publishing, $34.95.
THE END OF OIL
by Paul Roberts, Houghton Mifflin, $26.
RED SKY AT MORNING
by James G. Speth, Yale Univ. Press, $24.
THE CALL OF THE MALL
by Paco Underhill, Simon & Schuster, $14 paperback, 240pp.
Paco Underhill is a self-described "shopping scientist" and a Manhattan-based retail-design consultant. In a type of brass-knuckles class war, most modern shopping malls - Long Island's Roosevelt Field is a notable exception - have been deliberately designed without any or with only the barest minimum access to public transportation. Brainless consumerism and maximum environmental destruction are hallmarks of these American icons of modern life.
BEHIND THE GATES: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America
by Setha Low, Taylor & Francis, Inc., $18.95 paperback, 275pp.
Explores life inside a modern middle-class gated community, free from the 'contaminations' -- ie, people of the wrong color or social class -- of a typically urban/pedestrian lifestyle.
Books from 2003:
MY TIMES: A Memoir of Dissent
by John L. Hess.
John Hess, a reporter for the NY Times until 1978 (he died at age 87 in Jan. 2005), wrote this scathing indictment of the newspaper that wields so much influence for better and worse over our lives. Needless to say, no review or even mention of this book has appeared in the paper. Alex Zaitchik wrote in the free weekly NY Press (Jan. 26, 2005) about the book: "My Times is Hess' monument to the future. It is a devastating account of how the paper helped Robert Moses ravish the Bronx and Pat Moynihan libel the poor; how it blew My Lai, Watergate and the banking scandals that almost bankrupted the city [ca. 1975]; how it played along with the CIA abroad and Con Ed and Lilco at home; how it helped to wreck the campaign for national health insurance . . . "
SEA GATE REMEMBERED
by Arnold Rosen, Xlibris Press, $21.99 paperback, 278pp.
New York City's first gated community, at the western end of Coney Island.
WHERE VULTURES FEAST - Shell, Human Rights and Oil in the Niger Delta
by Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Verso Books, $24.
HIGHWAY ROBBERY - Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity
by Robert Bullard, Glenn Johnson, Angel Torres, editors, South End Press, $20.
THE RIGHT TO THE CITY: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space
by Don Mitchell, Guilford Press, $23.
TILTING AT MILLS: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings and the Corporate Squeeze
by Lis Harris, Houghton Mifflin, $25.
Lis Harris is a former New Yorker staff writer. Here she reviews the 8-year-long rise and fall of the innovative "green" plan put forth by Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the NRDC, to build a paper-recycling mill in a rail yard in the South Bronx, and how it ended up, in his view, dying a slow death from "a million bureaucratic bee stings."
Books from 2002:
BETWEEN EMINENCE & NOTORIETY: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning
by Chester Hartman, CUPR Press, $25; 405 pp.
RESOURCE WARS: The New Landscape of Global Conflict
by Michael T. Klare, Owl Books (Henry Holt], $? hardcover.
[not reviewed]
HIGH AND MIGHTY: SUV's -- the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way
by Keith Bradsher, New York: Public Affairs, $28 hardcover.
THE CITY IN MIND: Meditations on the Urban Condition
by James Howard Kunstler, The Free Press, $25 hardcover.
Mr. Kunstler has written terrific books on the American condition (The Geography of Nowhere, 1993, and Home From Nowhere 1996). Check out his website, which includes a very funny Eyesore of the Month.
SELLING THE LOWER EAST SIDE: Culture, Real Estate and Resistance in NYC
by Christopher Mele, Univ of Minn. Press, $19.95 paperback.
THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF MANHATTAN, 1900-1940
by Max Page, Univ. of Chicago Press, $27.50 hardcover.
Books from 2001:
EMPIRE STATESMAN: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith
by Robert A. Slayton, Free Press, $30.
Books from 1999:
THE CAMPAIGN: Giuliani, Messinger, Sharpton and the Race to Be Mayor of NYC
by Evan J. Mandery, Westview Press, $27 hardcover, 400pp.
Gives a detailed ground-level view of the 1997 NYC mayoral campaign and how dirty politics, dirty media and paid liars under the leash of the NYC establishment contrived to subvert democracy. Mandery, a lawyer and research director for Ruth Messinger's doomed campaign, is unsparing of his portraits of all the key players.
Books from 1997:
ASPHALT NATION: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back
by Jane Holtz Kay, Crown Publishers, $27.50 hardcover.
Jane Holtz Kay's new book relentlessly challenges America's "love affair with the automobile." Asphalt Nation promises and delivers a series of measures to reduce auto use as a solution. As a dedicated auto-free activist, I am very much in agreement with virtually every colorful word and turn of phrase that Ms. Kay, a widely respected architectural critic, offers. The book is a must read for those of us who have been raising these same concerns through the years.
She begins with her visit to the first ever Auto-Free Cities Conference, held in NYC a little over six years ago. Though not mentioned in the book, her review of that conference was the first ever serious treatment of the auto-free movement in the NY Times.
Asphalt Nation has been generally well received in the environmental and urban planning communities. Neverthelesss, some reviewers in the general press, like Hugo Lindgren, writing in Queens Newsday, have been put off by her massive indictment of the auto. They would have liked a few chapters on what the car has done for as well as to America. But given the almost religious intensity of automobile worship [and indoctrination] in America, and the corresponding marginalization of non-drivers, I think her fevered pitch is indeed appropriate.
She is really at her best when she describes the devastation visited upon our cities in the name of "saving" them by making them more auto-friendly. While she savors her new-found auto-free life style in her beloved Boston, she speaks for many, many Americans who yearn for a similar non-auto-dependent urban setting. Ms. Kay tells us how America can and why it must move in that direction.
(review excerpted from the New York Streetcar News, July '97; written by George Haikalis)
FORTRESS AMERICA: Gated Communities in the U.S.
by Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Brookings Inst. Press, $24.95.
THE UNREAL AMERICA: Architecture and Illusion
by Ada Louis Huxtable, New Press, $30.
Ms. Huxtable, a former architecture critic for the New York Times, turns a philosophical eye on places like Disneyland, the Mall of America, Las Vegas and neo-traditionalist planned towns, concluding that our sense of reality in our buildings has become blurred, and that the antidote should be abstract, minimalist, undecorated modernist experiments, of which she trots out several examples.
Ms. Huxtable apparently wrote this book to punch back at writers like James Howard Kunstler, who in The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere pinpoints modernist theories for the destruction wrought on our cities in the name of urban renewal. Although the book is for the most part a poorly argued polemic, it is still a spirited read, calling unabashedly for artistic innovation, while also surgically unmasking the Disney Company as first and foremost a cynical and highly profitable real estate marketing machine.
(review excerpted from the New York Streetcar News, Oct '97; written by W. Fields)
Books from 1995:
TOXIC SLUDGE IS GOOD FOR YOU: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Common Courage Press [Maine], $16.95.
Still in print! The essential primer on the sleazy corporate propaganda that Americans are mired in, propaganda designed to enhance corporate profits, but that perpetuates the multiple crises we are in.
UNDERGROUND HARMONIES - Music and Politics in the Subways of New York
by Susie Tanenbaum, Cornell Univ. Press, $17.95
This book about subway musicians, their history and the official reaction to them will undoubtedly be the standard reference for the next few decades. The book examin[es] NYC's historically tortured approach to public space, both above ground and in the subways. Tanenbaum explains how social elites pressed for official campaigns to eliminate the most democratic aspects of public space: musicians, including organ grinders, and trolleys. City Hall eagerly embraced the principle of "controlled community," which maintains that cities are safer and better when they are quiet and empty, and strangers are kept away, rather than the diversity ideal.
Ms. Tanenbaum, a Program Director at the Jackson Heights Community Development Corp., reminds readers that musicians increase world harmony, and that the City needs to rethink its extremely conservative, even provincial approach to its public spaces so that community-minded activities (and the trolleys that support them) can flourish.
(review excerpted from the New York Streetcar News, Jan. '97; written by W. Fields)
MORTGAGING THE EARTH: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment and the Crisis of Development
by Bruce Rich, Beacon Press.
Multinational oil extraction industries are among the most rapacious on the planet.
Books from 1993:
THE NEW YORK APPROACH: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City
by Joel Schwartz, Ohio State Univ. Press, $35 hardcover.
This book attempts to answer the question of how New York's liberal establishment allowed master builder Robert Moses so much leeway in tearing down poor and working class neighborhoods to make room for middle class housing projects, office towers and highways to the suburbs. Exhaustively researched using original documents, the author's fine-grained account of the beginnings of NYC's public housing programs will probably be too detailed for the general reader.
It's certainly not a glorious part of New York's past. Racism and covert Jim Crow laws drove much of the decision making, resulting in lots of defenseless people being evicted with little or no concern for their relocation. Residents and New York-o-philes will relish the tales of backroom negotiations that resulted in Stuyvesant Village, Lincoln Center, Morningside Heights, Manhattantown, the South Village and projects in Brownsville, Harlem and elsewhere.
Although trolleys are not the focus of this book, their intimate relation to land use and development make it important for trolley advocates to understand how real estate interests in New York get their way. Today, at places like Brooklyn's Atlantic Center, Queens West and Riverside South, the public interest in good urban planning is usually set aside so that private developers, often publicly subsidized, can build upper middle class and rich enclaves geared for motorists. These new developments' giant parking garages and general lack of transit facilities point directly to another generation of New Yorkers condemned to traffic chaos and pollution.
(review excerpted from the New York Streetcar News, Nov. '94; written by W. Fields)
Books from 1990:
THE CITY SQUARE: A Historical Evolution
by Michael Webb, Whitney Library of Design (Watson-Guptill), $45 hardcover.
This remarkable book, now out of print, is long overdue for a second edition, perhaps as a more affordable paperback. It's a richly illustrated survey of the history, design and use of the great plazas and squares of the world's most sophisticated and beloved cities. New York is represented here by Union Square and Rockefeller Center, both rather cramped and stingy compared to most other cities' great public spaces.
Books selected, written and compiled by Wayne Fields except where noted.
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