Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure." "In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where everyplace is like noplace in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens. Kunstler explains how our present zoning laws impoverish the life of our communities, and how all our efforts to make automobiles happy have resulted in making human beings miserable. He shows how common building regulations have led to a crisis in affordable housing, and why street crime is directly related to our traditional disregard for the public realm." "Kunstler takes the reader on a historical journey to understand how Americans came to view their landscape as a commodity for exploitation rather than a social resource. He explains why our towns and cities came to be wounded by the abstract dogmas of Modernism, and reveals the paradox of a people who yearn for places worthy of their affection, yet bend their efforts in an economic enterprise of destruction that degrades and defaces what they most deeply desire." "Kunstler proposes sensible remedies for this American crisis of landscape and townscape: a return to sound principles of planning and the lost art of good place-making, an end to the tyranny of compulsive commuting, the unreality of the suburb, the alienation and violence of downtown, the vulgarity of the highway strip, and the destruction of our countryside. The Geography of Nowhere puts the issue of how we actually live squarely at the center of our ongoing debate about the nation's economy and America's future.

From literature, social chronicles, and family documents comes a study of the evolution and social role of the English country house since the Middle Ages

"Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture - not the friendly unassuming architecture of the vernacular but the uniquely strange and exciting buildings put up by the great and powerful, ranging from huge houses to gem-like pavilions and lodges designed for feasting and hunting - is a phenomenon as remarkable as the literature which accompanied it, the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Marlow, Jonson, Campion and others. Forty years after adventuring into this world in his first book, 'Robert Smythson', in which he discussed one family of mason-architects and the great houses with which they were connected, Mark Girouard has returned to the subject to cover the whole rich field in detail. In this beautiful and fascinating book, Girouard discusses social structure and the way of life behind it, the evolution of the house plan, the ferment of excitement aroused in English patrons and craftsmen as they learnt about the classic Five Orders and the buildings of Ancient Rome from publications and engravings, the surprising wealth of architectural drawings which survive from the period, the inroads of foreign craftsmen who brought new fashions in ornament with them, but also the strength of the native tradition which was creatively integrated with the 'antique' style. Behind the book is a vivid consciousness of the European scene, and the different ways in which different countries reacted to new influences yet did not abandon their native traditions. Italy, France, central Europe and above all the Low Countries provide the background, and England was influenced by all of them. But the principal argument of the book is the individuality of the English achievement. Girouard's pioneering work on Elizabethan architecture, then an unfashionable period, has helped inspire an increasing number of architectural historians to venture into the field. His new book benefits from their researches and publications, but is essentially a product of new research and travel on his part. The results are displayed with his own unique sense of style, and are fired by the excitement which the architecture of the period still generates in him." -- from book jacket.