Customer Reviews

The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is an excellent portrayal of small town USA citizens and at the same time and earnest critique of Disney's capital appetite. Ross weaves these stories together to create a fascinating read.

Celebrationites are a unique crew hailing from all over the country for reasons as varies as hoping the monorail system at Disneyworld could use a retired doctor as the conductor to expecting the cutting edge, progressive school to improve teenage grades and angst. Ross interviews the citizenry allowing them to tell their stories to an honest interviewer and fellow townee as opposed to their usual experience of giving five minute sound bite interviews from media folk in town for the afternoon. Celebration comes across as a town with incredible civic involvement and interesting inhabitants. Most citizen issues seem common to small neighborhoods, although some do have to do with the Disney Company and their poor construction of houses.

Ross demonstrates how the Disney Co. established Celebration as an (overpriced) homestead for varied income level inhabitants and racial diversity. Unfortunately neither was accomplished and the town is largely white and upper middle class. Celebration was designed to combat the ills of the urban sprawl overtaking the central Florida region and to promote clean living, community sentiment and an alternative to the glare of franchise neon lights. Interestingly, Ross points out that at the same time the Disney Co. is daily recruiting underpaid labor from Florida's immigrant pool of Mexicans and Central Americans who are forced to squeeze into tiny apartments on the strip thus adding to the urban sprawl as well as exploited laborers.

Ross relies on concrete data and solid interview to critique Disney's plans and true motivations for building celebration - 20 years worth of permits to develop their property holdings in Central Florida and continue to fortify their kingdom.

An excellent book, I highly recommend it!

Andrew Ross is hardly the kind of person for whom Celebration was built. He's single, he has no children, and he's apparently an educated intellectual with an abiding love of urban life. Nonetheless, he has done a very capable, skilled job in The Celebration Chronicles. Accurate coverage of the origins and early life of Disney's town required research and synthesis of the huge number of disparate elements - for example, architecural history and Disney's plans for its corporate future - and Ross has risen to the challenge in almost every way.

He does an especially good job - not surprising, for a college professor - of describing and analyzing the parents v. school war that had such an incredible influence on the town's development. Ross covers the external and internal politics, the education theory, and the human details of the school, as well as the many other, varied factors that fed into the battle.

The book also displays the results of the author's wide-ranging, thorough research. Ross appears to have entered into every social circle that would have him and even a few that wouldn't. He attended every town meeting, even those where he was the only resident present. He visited many residents and talked with the full range of social groups. He even carefully documented every rumor that blossomed on the flourishing town grapevine - that chapter makes for humorous reading indeed. All of Ross's research means that this book provides a very clear picture of the range and diversity of the residents and their lives in Celebration.

The book does founder a bit in the places where Ross's own leanings become too clear. His opinions - which, I'm grateful to say, are generally quarrantined in their own sections and chapters - about the town's issues are just what you'd expect from a hugely liberal educator without children. In the famed school battle, for example, his sympathy and empathy is all for the teachers and the lost innovative instruction paradigm. He appears totally incapable of understanding the parents' viewpoints, so his personal opinion is unbalanced.

Overall, though, this is a well-balanced, well-written, well-researched book. Considering the depth and complexity of the topic, this is an astounding work. Absolutely worth reading and owning, even if you'd never in your life consider residing in a place like Celebration.

This book certainly deserved its place on Amazon's top ten list of the year. I have read many stories in the press about Celebration, and hoped that someone with real feel for the residents would write an in-depth account of life inside that strange place. Ross set aside his life for a year, and dedicated himself to participating fully in all of the activities of the town. His efforts paid off, the book is a real eye opener, and will surprise anyone expecting a simple-minded diatribe about Stepford Wives in a Mickey Mouse town. The Celebration Chronicles gives us all kinds of lessons about urban planning, civil liberties, and public life in privatized suburbia. Best of all, while the book is an absorbing piece of journalism it is also a responsible ethnographic study conducted with several hundred hours of interviews with residents and Disney employees. The reader knows she is getting at deep community truths and not just superficial opinions from a few sound bites. The chapters about the school controversy are worth the price of the book along, but Ross has done a great job throughout, and produced a masterful commentary on America at the end of the century.

Andrew Ross's, The Celebration Chronicles, is a scholarly interpretation of the neo-traditional ideal and how it manifests itself with the development of a Florida community. From the onset of the book, it appears as if Celebration is everything that the Disney executives had envisioned and everything that the residents had hoped ---- but is it?

Ross, however, delays peeling back the town's veneer and instead takes us on a sight seeing tour of Celebration ---- along the way we can see palm-lined promenades, a beautiful lake, neo-traditional homes and stately designed commercial/residential buildings. The author, respectfully, gives deference to the key architectural styles ---- Anglo-Caribbean, Low Country and St Augustine. Ultimately, our travels along Market St take us to the town square and we feel somehow that Disney has delivered.

Then the serious questions begin and the reader becomes privy to a host of controversies ---- shoddy home construction, the prohibitive cost to live in Celebration, conflicts over the educational agenda of the K-12 school and a questionable commitment to social and ethnic diversity.

Ross's observations may reflect an intellectual detachment. But the reader will discover that the book has its share of levity and amusing anecdotes. He notes, for example, the following ---- rumors of gypsies taking up residence and a resident heard to say, "What we need are a few drunks around this town."

This book is a serious study. Forewarned ---- you won't find the vanity-fair critiques so pervasive in glossy journals and travel tabloids. What you will find, though, are the author's lengthy observations that attempt to explain all the factors ---- both positive and negative ---- that impact life in the community of Celebration. Eventually the book evolves into a valuable lesson on urban history and social science. I, as a reader, found the process of getting to this eventuality fulfilling and I recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in these topics.

A wonderful book, I just finished reading this it and it was not only humorous, as it is ripe with anectodes, but it is a serious text. The author lived in Celebration for a year and interviewed countless residents and attended what seems like every meeting. He also tracked down original documents and plans for the town and interviewed Disney executives right up to Michael Eisner.

This book is a political piece detailing the degree to which the Disney Co. has power in Central Florida and how residents were lured to the town under utopian pretenses that did not come true. It is discusses the New Urbanist tradition of town planning to create community and the author provokes the reader to consider to what degree the architecture impacts the personality of the town and how a management company can shape the community. The importance of the school to Celebration is discussed in depth and highlights present day issues in education for all citizens and parents, not just those in Celebration.

It is well researched and well written. For anyone who has heard the soundbites on the news about Celebration and wants an insider view, buy this book.

I have followed the infant years of Celebration, Florida in the press and it was wonderful to read this well written, earnest, and enjoyable book about the real life problems of Snow White's village.

This is an extremely interesting year in the life of a single, childless, downtown New Yorker learning about small town ways - at least, Disney's small town. The author deals with his subject in a very serious manner, this isn't tabloid press with a pretty cover. Ross is highly critical of Disney's motivations and the administration and development of this town. However, unlike the usual Disney bashing, the author references such specific sources that it is difficult not to believe this is an honest representation of how Mickey Mouse, turned residential developer and spin doctor, could have done a much better job.

Ross immersed himself in the community politics of Celebration and appears to have attended every community meeting held during the year he was there. He also endeared himself to a cross section of residents. The book is full of interviews with residents, the management company, and Disney execs among others. It also includes informative references to the original planning documents and pr campaign that attracted the residents. Ross certainly did extensive research for this book.

Amid engaging stories of overpriced and botched houses, a shopping district ill-suited to local needs, background on New Urbanism, and many interesting stories about why the residents moved to the planned Disney community, there are three absorbing in-depth chapters on the town's school. The most daunting part of the book is chapter 12 where Ross discusses the benefits Disney incurred through building Celebration. Apparently, by building Celebration Disney cut a juicy deal and was able to secure 20 years' worth of permits allowing it to continue its "dizzneying" sprawl and develop its existing real estate without regard to future environmental legislation - the affliction of landholders in central Florida. All roads seem to lead to the Tragic Kingdom and Disney has carte blanche to develop central Florida bypassing conventional process. If nothing else, you should read this chapter which details the corporate power of the Mouse.

In the end, it comes across throughout the book that the author seemed to have immensely enjoyed himself in the 'burbs, rubbing elbows with those seeking pixie dust and was able to uncover some truths about the making of this community.

I was set to love this book. It would either be a hatchet job on Disney's bizarre experiment or a thoughtful examination of just what such a town implies about American senses of community. Unfortunately, Ross hasn't written either. He instead has written a dutiful report on every aspect of Celebration's history, exercising little judgement as to what is interesting (the fight over the Celebration school) and what is pretty boring (the exercise habits of the residents, the locations of all the houses of worship). Not very compelling.

Andrew Ross didn't want to like Celebration. His urban friends laughed at him when he moved there to do research for this book. In the end, he liked some of the ideas behind the town, but hated the fact that it took Disney to think them up. His blind hatred for the corporate world shows up in every page of this book, so if you want to read anti-corporation diatribes, this is a dream read. But if you actually want to find out about Celebration, you'll find the book's subject curiously neglected. This is an odd beast, a book about Celebration that hardly seems to be about the town at all. For an excellent view of the town, read the other book written at about the same time by a couple who became Celebration homeowners. They have a much less knee-jerk perspective.

I loved this book. It is critical of Disney, but it's not your usual arm chair complaining. This author did his research.

Also it's nice to see Celebration depicted as a normal town with normal citizens with normal problems instead of an overhyped science project.

A big thank you to Mr. Ross.

The book wasn't what I expected. Some of my disappointment is that I guess I was expecting insight, and found little. Maybe I shouldn't have expected much, since most of us who take an apartment and live with our cats for a year wouldn't have a lot of fascinating things to say. We already know a lot of what this book hammers us with, over and over and over: teenage angst, small town rumors and paranoia, shoddy Florida construction, over-expectation of the Disney midas touch, underfunding of public education in Florida...

I own property in the general area and have some experience with Celebration. I also am an academic and understand going off somewhere for a sabbatical, and living among those whom you are studying. There just doesn't seem to be a lot there. I expect more from myself and colleagues when they go on sabbatical :)