From Library Journal
Without the usual accretions of academic writing, the author, a respected Harvard architectural and landscape historian, attempts a highly personal narrative, calling for his readers to become more aware of the quickly disappearing world around them. Stilgoe manifests keen observational skills on his diverse, peculiar topics?utility and rail lines, postal service, interstate highways, fences, small-town main streets, and motels. Disappointingly, however, his collection of brief essays fails to deliver an integrated whole. The text, written from the perspective of an anonymous "explorer" bicycling around the country, frequently carries a tone of arrogance despite Stilgoe's veneer of familiarity, and his failure to supply substance and details for many of his intriguing generalizations proves troublesome. In his effort to write an accessible plea, the author delivers part jeremiad, part motivational pep talk, and part how-to guide, with occasional brilliant perceptions such as one countering the assumption that Americans are more visually sophisticated today than in previous generations. However, Stilgoe generally fails to elaborate on human causes within an institutional context for the changes he observes. Not recommended.?Charles K. Piehl, Mankato State Univ., MN
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
An extended exhortation to readers to go outside and explore the natural and constructed environmentfrom urban fire hydrants to rural fences to highway pit stopsin the American and Emersonian tradition of the exploring eye/I. Stilgoe (Landscape History/Harvard), the author of previous books on American railroads and landscape, has had the academic's luxury of thinking about things most of us have precious little time to consider: the permanence of the antiquated railroad bed, the hum of alternating current, the uses and meaning of fences. Evangelically advocating for exploration that can't be accomplished by car, Stilgoe suggests bicycling and walking as ways of getting the news he preaches. The built environment, he lucidly reasons, is ``a sort of palimpsest, a document in which one layer of writing has been scraped off, and another one applied.'' The mindful explorer sees what came before, as well as whats there. The book is partly a lament on the ills of modern society and the passing of Main Street America, with the sweet luxury of its angle parking. He boldly claims, and at least half convinces, when he says that looking outside teaches creativity, problem-solving, a sense of history, pattern, and the magic of understanding. He is predictably arch when it comes to landscape design in public spacesin particular, the ubiquitous dwarf evergreen species that neatly line our roadside parking lots like housebroken pets (Stilgoe's image), and which he describes as part of the larger marketing strategy behind the development of interstate exchanges. But does Silgoe locate conspiracy where harried planners identified only economy? Stilgoe's is a voice in the wilderness, and this is an esoteric subject at once compelling and important yet, by the standard measuring stick of contemporary culture, sadly insubstantial. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Stilgoe puts on a spectacular performance. His ability to begin with his walking/bicycling explorer's observation of something in the landscape, loop into an extended disquisition on the thing, and finally circle back to the explorer's journey can be breathtaking. -- The Boston Globe, Peter G. Gosselin
About the Author
John R. Stilgoe is Orchard Professor of Landscape History at Harvard University. He is the author of Alongshore; Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene; Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb; and Common Landscape of America, 1540 to 1845. He lives in Norwell, Massachusetts.
