The Magic and the Madness

I just received this in the mail today, my most recent present from Bookins, a lovely book-trading site. I've been wanting to read this book for more than half a decade! I think I got it on ILL once while thesising, but it didn't get much attention amidst all those other bibliographic gems!

Of course, such magic as book-swapping sites is only one of the positive aspects of the internet-ization of our world. There are obvious downsides, such as the "agoraphobia-inducing spectacle" Kunstler describes. I know that part all too well!

So far, I'm very delighted with this younger work of Kunstler's, compared to his even more vituperative recent work.

"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading--the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the 'gourmet mansardic' junk-food joints, the Orwellian office 'parks' featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call 'growth'" (10).

- James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

(Subtitled: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape)