Customer Reviews

The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City

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I am certainly biased, but I love this book. It's not a conventional history of a city, but a perceptive analysis of contemporry American society in urban form. Graff reveals the underside of glitzy Dallas and goes on to show how the city's myth works to obscures the inequalities that shape this sprawling, segregated, suburbanized metropolis. Like Mike Davs's City of Quartz, a study of LA as postmodern America, this book delivers more than it promises. Read it, and you'll see skyscrapers, freeways, and city spaces in amazing new ways, wherever you go.

I bought this book because lately I've been visiting Dallas quite a bit for work. I always like to read up on the history and social and cultural currents of places I spend time in.

To put it simply, this is a badly written book. The author has about three or four ideas that he repeats incessantly. For the most part he doesn't develop them, he just repeats them. He seems to feel the need to reiterate them in opening and closing paragraphs of almost every section. It begins to seem like the entire book is nothing but a prologue for another book which will actually put some meat on these thematic bare bones. Even as far along in the text as page 94 he's still announcing what the book is supposed to prove (though he's announced it more than once by that point): "This book explicates..." You'd think that by that time he'd already have been "explicating" whatever he had to explicate. Actually, to quote the entire sentence: "This book explicates the intricate interrelationships between the mythology and ideology of Dallas's rise and achievement, expressed in its symbols and identity, on the one hand, and the creation, operation, and maintenance of an elite-dominated growth machine and its center of power, on the other." This kind of dry and overworked technocratic prose is the rule in this book. If you were to cut out the redundancy, this book would be less than half its current length. If it were written more like a narrative and less like a government report, it would be far more engaging.

That's not to say it's lacking in raw material: it appears well researched and it has copious end notes. Happily the author manages to include quotes from many of his sources, without which I'd never have gotten the slightest feel for what has been going on in Dallas, Texas, USA; instead I'd have been lost in the author's generalized, abstract socio-political philosophizing. His discussion about boosterism is packaged in a quasi-philosophical discussion of the function of "mythologizing". His description of what the place looks like comes in the context of a political discussion of the "meaning" of "landscape". Instead of saying that Dallas's buildings tend to copy the architecture of other cities, he pulls out an exposition of what he calls "mimesis". None of this resort to trendy academic theory adds much if anything to our understanding of Dallas, or of cities, or of the theories that are--almost gratuitously--tossed into the discussion.

There are some nuggets of interest in this book so it wasn't a complete loss, but in general it's not worth the slog.