Overall, this is a great book that succinctly gets a message across that most of us already feel on a day-to-day basis but cannot articulate. American towns and cities are miserable. Bureaucracy and fools proclaiming themselves wise have turned our landscape into an inefficient and demoralizing dystopia of asphalt, exhaust, and cheap imitations of the great buildings that came before us.
That said, there are a few things holding the book back. Firstly, the authors have a tendency to put a great amount of information into footnotes. Sometimes as much as a third of a page is in the footnotes below it. I do not like this practice as it interrupts the flow of reading. Secondly, the illustrations in the book are very small and very low resolution, given the nature of the book it could use larger pictures to illustrate some of the things the text is talking about. And lastly, despite the book being mostly apolitical, the authors’ bias and lack of expertise in a particular area does creep in from time to time, especially in their discussion on fire departments.
The authors insinuate that fire engines are needlessly large because fire marshals (the fact that they said fire marshals, who inspect buildings for code, and not fire chiefs, who are responsible for their departments equipment and personnel shows their ignorance on the subject) are men and they are “comparing the size of their equipment.” They then quip that more female fire marshals might reverse this trend, which is insultingly low cunning. Never mind the fact that I’m sure none of the authors has ever worked on a fire engine or understands what it does or how it does it. Building a machine capable of pumping thousands of gallons of water at hundreds of PSI while also carrying literal tons of equipment and personnel is not something that can be condensed down to the size of a Prius. The authors would be much better off restricting their sly remarks to the things that they know and not the things they know nothing about.
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