East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story, directed by Sarah Burns and David McMahon (Washington, DC: Florentine Films and WETA, 2002). Review by Courtney Rawlings Following their Peabody Award-winning documentary The Central Park Five (2012), co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s newest film examines another depressing tale of race in America. East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020), focuses […]
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Reviewed by Alex Sayf Cummings In his lovely new book on John Maynard Keynes, The Price of Peace, Zachary D. Carter paints a portrait of Bloomsbury, the economist’s artsy egghead neighborhood of […]
Sandoval-Strausz, A.K. Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Reviewed by Maricio Castro In August of 2017 I moved to Durham, North Carolina. Because I could not go apartment hunting ahead of time and because I had a very large dog that many landlords would not take, I had […]
Hemphill, Katie M. Bawdy City: Commercial Sex and Regulation in Baltimore, 1790-1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Jessica R. Pliley Over 20 years ago, Timothy Gilfoyle challenged historians of prostitution to explore the flow of capital between urban brothels and the formal and informal economies of the city. More recently, Amy Dru Stanley framed the […]
Slobin, Mark. Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Bob Carey Detroit once meant cars, speed, and movement. In his new memoir Motor City Music, Mark Slobin takes us on a leisurely, unconventional ride through the city, telling the story of growing up and being shaped by the […]
Kotlowitz, Alex. An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2019. Reviewed by Sara Paretsky The demonstrations that swept America in the wake of George Floyd’s murder seemed to show that the country had reached a tipping point: centuries after the enslavement of Africans arrived in the New World, a majority of […]
Yanni, Carla. Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Reviewed by Jim Wunsch After leaving for college, students may discover that the campus, if not exactly like those depicted in Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, is in certain respects like a city neighborhood. If […]
Walton, Nicholas. Singapore, Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency. London: Hurst & Company, 2018. By Taoyu Yang If territorial size were the critical factor in determining a country’s success, then Singapore, at 280 square miles (less than half the size of Houston), would seem little more than a curious throwback to antiquity: a city-state, somehow still […]
By Davarian L. Baldwin Balto, Simon. Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. By 2015, Chicago had become a symbol of the broken relationship between Black communities and the law enforcement apparatus. Outrage over the massive police cover-up of Laquan McDonald’s killing […]
By Richard Harris Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. New York: E.P.Dutton, 1974. Let me fess up: I’m cheating. Apart from the fact that this was written half a century ago, Soft City isn’t a neglected item of urban historical writing. It was one of the two books that made me into a student of cities. The other […]
