Books in Brief: The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler (Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $23)

‘IT WAS a sweet view,” wrote Jane Austen in Emma, “sweet to the eye and the mind.” But just as the poised and decorous action of Jane Austen’s novels owed much to the architectonic grace of their settings, so the increasingly bleak, soulless, and monotonous landscape of modern America is mirrored in such grim tales of “urban reality” as the recent. movie Falling Down. The atrophying of America’s man-made landscape is the central concern of this book. Despite the tepid prose style of James Howard Kunstler and the irritating absence of an index, one turns the pages in a state of appalled fascination. Sprawling freeways, monstrous shopping malls, towering corporate fortresses, high-tech elevated streetcars, glaring neon billboards, K-Mart ubiquity, inner-city dereliction— as Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the eighteenth-century architect of the picturesque landscape, would have concluded, there is “great capability of improvement here.”

MR

About the Author

Michael Romain

Featured Tags

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler (Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $23)

‘IT WAS a sweet view,” wrote Jane Austen in Emma, “sweet to the eye and the mind.” But just as the poised and decorous action of Jane Austen’s novels owed much to the architectonic grace of their settings, so the increasingly bleak, soulless, and monotonous landscape of modern America is mirrored in such grim tales of “urban reality” as the recent. movie Falling Down. The atrophying of America’s man-made landscape is the central concern of this book. Despite the tepid prose style of James Howard Kunstler and the irritating absence of an index, one turns the pages in a state of appalled fascination. Sprawling freeways, monstrous shopping malls, towering corporate fortresses, high-tech elevated streetcars, glaring neon billboards, K-Mart ubiquity, inner-city dereliction— as Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the eighteenth-century architect of the picturesque landscape, would have concluded, there is “great capability of improvement here.”