"The Geography of Nowhere"

The Geography of Nowhere - The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape is the title of a book authored by James Howard Kunstler. The book's back cover states, "The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots." Robert Taylor, of the Boston Globe, says that Kunstler's book describes an "environment by the auto, suburban developers, purblind zoning and corporate pirates."

In the first chapter Kunstler writes,

"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 ... village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the ... junk food joints, ... the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, ... spectacle that politicians proudly call "growth."

The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other world-wide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity it represents."

This interesting look at the evolution of America's community architecture and its impact on our lives is published by Simon and Schuster, New York. First Touchstone Edition 1994. The  paperback edition is ISB-N-0-671-88825-0. You can order a copy from www.Amazon.com.