Customer Reviews

The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home

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If you have ever raged against the greed of "development" or experienced the sadness of seeing the fencerow you explored as a child plowed under by "progress," The Place You Love Is Gone is a warm and welcome act of understanding and comprehension. Holbrook weaves a tale of reminicence with a subtle but effective exposition of a movement that is destroying not only the places we know and that are part of us; but a "development" movement that is destroying our self.

Holbrook's writing style interjects (sometimes startling) facts with an overall story about life in three communities--Akron, Hoboken, and the Catskills of New York. The book has an almost poetic feel and does drag at times. However, overall, the style is effective. One cannot put down this book and not think of his or her first home--and tellingly, that home is probably gone forever for most of us.

This is a book that needed to be written and Holbrook did a magnificent job of effectively communicating the effects of the "development" industry without the normal soap box stands. An excellent work and likely to become a classic.

Everyone I mention this book to gets the same stricken look of recognition and loss on their face. For Pierson's Akron, I substitute a half-acre of scrubby woods across the street from the house I grew up in, a half-acre that, like her Akron, has been torn up in favor of a McMansion with the obligatory SUV parked in front.

If not a suburban half-acre, then a working-class neighborhood with its street life and its shops -- or, opening the lens very wide now, entire upstate NY towns drowned for the sake of New York City's reservoir system. (No wonder they hate us!) The thing about Pierson's book is, it doesn't stop at being a mournfully witty, acidulous elegy for one lost place but takes in what you have to call the big picture -- the population growth, the accelerated pace of development, the hectic rush to Mall-Wart and Home De(s)pot and McMansions and wide roads and and and ... -- in which, p.s., most of us, as she doesn't let us get away without acknowledging, are complicit. (I do love visiting a certain Marshall's in a certain formerly charming upstate town, myself.)

For my money, "The Place You Love Is Gone" belongs on the shelf next to Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" -- because the writing is just so damn wonderful and angry (and, in Pierson's case, funny too) and because this is one of those books that rings the alarm loud and clear. Most of use have been standing around looking at the latest deceitfully named subdivision ("Spreading Oaks"), shaking our heads and muttering "Wha' happen?" Melissa Pierson will tell you.

Perhaps it is because I am originally from Akron, Ohio, one of the places where fellow native Pierson lovingly writes about with clarity and sorrow. Or perhaps it is just because I love well-written books about landscapes and places. Regardless, this book is still resonating with me several months after reading it. Pierson weaves in her own memoir of the places she has known and lived in her life with their history and quotes from other authors. Along the way she makes the point that we take our landscapes and special buildings for granted until it is too late and they have been replaced by strip malls and a more homogenous American background.

For anyone who has ridden their bikes around their childhood neighborhoods or have known each house, each bush and tree, or corner store or the threads of roads and hills which form our memories of place, this book will have great meaning. You will be taken to your home place, wherever that may be, and you will see our vanishing American landscape with greater appreciation. Pierson's lucid, introspective prose is a pleasure to read.

Holbrook Pierson's dreamy and emotive look at changing landscapes, both in her personal history and the history of America (mostly) invites the reader to identify the ghosts of their own lost places. The second-person voice points at the heart of the reader even though it is her memories we drift through. What I found compelling about the book was not necessarily her anger at the collective disregard for patience and care for place (it's become so easy to rail, unsuccessfully, against the Wal-marts or McMansions), but her style. The book reads like one long prose poem, full of startling, recognizable and even funny images.

That the voice can sound both emotional and right at the same time is admirable. The cries are like a slap in the face to wake up: wake up to what we're losing. There were times I felt this cry might be too one-sided, too apt to romantisize the past or the victims of forced change, but I think Pierson aknowledges this for the most part. She articulates so elegantly what many people feel about "progress".

I must confess, I read the first chapter and was blown away. I thought for sure I was holding a book for the ages. Melissa Holbrook Pierson starts her book with a reflection on her past in Akron. The chapter alone stands as a testament to her ability to grab a reader's most hidden memories, dust them off and create a sense of desire in all of us to go back to the way things used to be. Who of us doesn't recall walking aimlessly as a child and how the corners of the earth appeared like they were ours to discover? Who also doesn't regret that the innocence of youth is no longer available to our children, who often can't even go to the park without an adult watching them? Ms. Pierson's ability to recall the childhood memories in all of us is uncanny and proves her talent.

After reflecting on her youth in Akron, she progresses to her early adulthood in Hoboken and captures many of the difficulties that a young adult encounters as they are trying to establish themselves outside the confines of home. Unfortunately, the balance of regret of days gone by with how things are no longer the same looses its punch. Her retelling of Hoboken has accounts of how she slept with the lights on due to the mice in her apartment, how she was underpaid, how she had an apartment with next to no heat, how friendships came and went, but what she doesn't ever say is what we all say at one point in our lives: that the life of a college aged beatnik, living off of junk food and sleeping until noon, more worried about the band at the bar, than the heat in her apartment, gets old. She also fails to mention that the same reason that she left Akron is why she would end up leaving Hoboken: the desire in many of us for something more. A desire often promoted by well educated people who encourage their kids to go out and make a difference. The exact type of person that Ms. Pierson exemplifies and thus she is living the problem. Why did she value bands at Maxwell's? Wasn't she (like all of us) wanting to get rid of our parent's old things for something new? Thus, she never gets her hands around why people like change so darn much: although she does a great job at telling us all why change is the enemy, even though the entire book is a progression on the changes in her life.

The last chapter is the book's weakest and is a retelling of how land in upstate New York was taken so that the people in Manhattan could build dams and have more water. Instead of having the reader long for the past, she is now full force on her attempt to persuade the reader that something horribly wrong was done in this area. She most likely is correct; however, by this point the awkward, lovely writing of the first and somewhat second chapter has now vanished along with her effectiveness to make the reader feel the author's presence. In the first chapter, she is like a person you meet having a quiet conversation and although it is late, you would rather stay up than cut the conversation off. In chapter three, it is as if you are standing in front of Ms. Pierson's bull horn and all you want to do is get out of the room and return to the confidant you found in chapter one. The sad thing is that even with her bullhorn, Ms. Pierson fails to ever point the finger at herself and thus by the third chapter she has changed the tone of the book from a sharing of her life to a depiction of the harms done to others.

So the book ends with the reader having lost connection with the author, which is the biggest loss, because the introduction Ms. Pierson makes in chapter one leaves one wanting so much more and wondering . . . why she changed?

I enjoyed this book as I am a lover of the history of places and like to know how a village,town or cityscape came about.

I felt a connection to the book because of previous work assignments in a dead end Ohio town , being able to see Hoboken from my office and owning a home in Ulster County, not far from the Catskills and only a short hop from Kingston.

For me the only disappointments were the overwrought metaphysical language Pierson used in the first chapter in describing Akron and the lack of detail on Kingston, the proposed third chapter.

The third chapter is strange in this way in that Pierson is discussing the barbaric approach that New York City used to appropriate clean water supplies ,although the chapter title is about Kingston, she only spends a handful of pages talking about Kingston.

These are minor quibbles ,the work done in the third chapter captured the current shape of the county and how it was irrevocably changed by the reservoirs which replaced the drowned villages.

THE PLACE YOU LOVE IS GONE: PROGRESS HITS HOME hit particularly hard for author Melissa Holbrook Pierson, who tells of three special places in her life which have been radically changed. From her birthplace Akron, Ohio which shaped her soul to her move to Hoboken, New Jersey which was a backwater to New York until its transformation during the eighties, special places which have been transformed by growth and progress are considered for their sense of place, purpose, and changes over time. A compelling blend of memoir and survey of growth planning and change.