Customer Reviews

Walk for Your Life! Restoring Neighborhood Walkways to Enhance Community Life, Improve Street Safety and Reduce Obesity

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

My wife picked up this book for me, since she knew I am interested in walkable communities, and it didn't disappoint.

It is filled with the history of communities, and takes a page from Kunstler's earlier works regarding suburbia and sprawl. I liked the ties that she made between our increasingly sedentary lifestyles and obesity, illness, and childhood disease. Ms. Demers discusses our dependence on cars, the hostile environment design to limit walking to desitinations. She finishes the book with some suggested solutions, for individuals, communities, and the design of future neighborhoods. Some of the information in the book I have gathered from other sources, but it is a good overall reference for walkable communities, and increasing the amount of walking that you do in your daily life. I especially liked some of the "side" stories that she had in there. For example, how advances in packaging and decreased food preparation and clean-up has made our lives easier, but has led to more time on the couch and less time that would have been spent standing to prepare a meal and then clean it up after. (That's why that fat-free cake didn't lead to my weight loss...heh heh)

It comes with a 4/5 star recommendation from me. I would have given the 5th star if there was more information on how to go about affecting change in your community (petitions, attending town meetings, etc.) Pick it up from Amazonm for a good quick informative read.

This is one of those elephants in the living room sorts of book. I liked reading it because it articulated many of my own frustrations about my neighborhood and my ability to be outside. "Is there a simpler or more natural activity than walking? Then, how could such a healthy human activity become so dangerous and unwelcome in just a few decades?" In Walk for your Life! these questions are asked and answered. How DID we suburbanites get to accepting, to not even thinking about the disappearance of walking as a daily occurrence, a no big deal sort of activity? I'm a baby boomer. I remember walking to school, staying out playing until dark. In my case, I now live in a neighborhood where our family has always commented on how completely convenient our home is to everything. And it is. We live on a lake, our home is very attractive. It's also within walking distance to the local convenience store, a little further a complete supermarket, the sports club, the post office and Fed Ex, seven or eight restaurants, bookstore, and every sort of retail store. And, when I first moved here, I actually did try to walk to these places. But, sporadic sidewalks give way to narrowed or non-existent shoulders on the roads where I had to wait until the cars let up and then sprint across those areas. Not to mention, I felt conspicuous as I walked along. Not another soul in sight the entire walk, other than in passing cars. I remember thinking that if I ever tried this again, I needed to be dressed as a jogger. What I had been trying to do was walk as a means of transportation, not for exercise or as a special leisure activity. I didn't realize that until I read this book. A ha! I saw a really big elephant and it's shaped like a SUV! So, our home IS convenient, as long as we use our car. Walk for your Life! points out what is wrong with this picture, and offers ways to bring back all kinds of walking into our lives.
The book made me think about my own life as a walker and also about the big picture -- road and town planning and zoning, about watching life on TV rather than being outside in it with my neighbors, about reduced health and being fat for not moving around more. It's not only worth reading, it's also well written and very readable. It's also got a great list of resources - organizations that promote walking, other books, websites.

Walk For Your Life is an articulate perspective on why the art of walking is on the decline in our computerized, automated and industrialized world. With obesity at an all-time high, especially among children and teens, and obesity- and sedentary lifestyle-related diseases precipitously on the rise, this is an important and timely new book!

Epidemiologist and walking enthusiast, Dr. Marie Demers, explains how our attitudes toward walking are a sociological phenomenon and not just an idiosyncratic personal response to environmental factors. We drive cars to the supermarket or the mall because our communities have been designed around the automobile rather than the on the human scale of the older walkable neighborhoods and communities.

This book offers encouragement to individuals to walk more regularly and purposefully. It offers advise to community planners, zoning boards and educators on how to create and/or maintain the "walkability" and pedestrian safety of our communities. And it offers a vision for a healthier, friendlier and more active society where walking is enjoyed by all as a essential part of everyday life.

I heartily recommend Walk For Your Life! to everyone who wants
to be healthier and who wants to live in a healthier, safer and friendlier community.

I just got this book last week and it's changing my perception of every home I see, every person I see walking, every small town main street, every shopping plaza or mall, and every time I see a TV flashing through a window as I drive by!

This book really shows how we have all become strangers--how we have been separated by TV, cell phones, cars and urban sprawl. and how really sedentary we have become in the last few generations. We better watch out--through short-sighted planning and design we are creating young generations who will be unhealthy, overweight and artificially connected to their surroundings and families and friends.

In the second section I found the discussion of "Taxi Moms" particularly interesting. They are a result of urban sprawl--Moms who drive their kids everywhere, have to drive to the store for food, for supplies, and even get in the car to drive the kids to friends houses, sometime a half hour away or more. These moms spend a huge amount of their time driving, and under stress and isolated. And they and their children not connected to neighbors and lacking a sense of real community. It says that in 1995 (and it's now worse) the average American worker spent 443 hours behind the wheel (55 work days) from commuting alone.

This book has lots of information like this and puts it all together in a way that builds a new picture of society in your head. Great read.

Street and subways in urban areas are increasingly inhospitable to walkers even as health publications advocate more walking for health: that's why the message in WALK FOR YOUR LIFE: RESTORING NEIGHBORHOOD WALKWAYS TO ENHANCE COMMUNITY LIFE, IMPROVE STREET SAFETY AND REDUCE OBESITY is so essential. Author Marie Demers, Ph.D. has been a health researcher for the past twenty-five years: her background of psychology, biology and anthropology lend to a survey of urban environments and what creates and encourages a 'walkable' environment to bring back both health and community sense. An excellent call for better urban planning reinforcing the health benefits of walking.

In Walk For Your Life!: Restoring Neighborhood Walkways To Enhance Community Life, Improve Street Safety And Reduce Obesity, author Marie Demers draws upon her more than twenty-five years experience as a health researcher, an epidemiology, as well as her background in psychology, biology, and anthropology, and worldwide travels to create a comprehensive and utterly persuasive argument in favor of creating safe, health inducing, walkways in urban and suburban locales so that men and women of all ages and health conditions can obtain the undeniably benefits of regular exercise through the simple means of walking. Indeed, Demers lays out a clear and convincing case for the restoration of a "walkable" environment that would have the additional social benefits of enhancing community life while addressing the current obesity epidemic. Walk For Your Life! is "must" reading for anyone seeking to establish the opportunity for more mobile, healthy inducing, pleasurable opportunities and conditions in their community allowing them to walk their way into a better physical, mental, and emotional condition.