Rating: 
Summary: what a pleasure!
Review: A perfect example of theoretical bricolage. Ross has combined narrative, semiotics and corporate culture into a must read for anyone interested in hyperreality and the postmodern condition. Finally a scholar who grounds his work with rigorous research, humor and insight. I will use this book as an example of what cultural studies can be.
Rating: 
Summary: What a nightmare!
Review: A windy montage of extemporaneous rambling. This book is neither concise nor interesting. Dr. Ross must have one of the largest vocabularies ever known to mankind, or else he has somehow programmed his word processor's thesaurus to replace every adjective with the counterpart containing the largest number of syllables. The definitive history of Celebration remains to be written. I will use this book as an example of what occurs when book lacks judicious editing. Recommended only for those who understand the concept of theoretical bricolage.
Rating:
Summary: Fun and intelligent book!
Review: A wonderful book, I just finished reading this it and it was not only humorous, as it is ripe with anectodes, but it is a serious text. The author lived in Celebration for a year and interviewed countless residents and attended what seems like every meeting. He also tracked down original documents and plans for the town and interviewed Disney executives right up to Michael Eisner. This book is a political piece detailing the degree to which the Disney Co. has power in Central Florida and how residents were lured to the town under utopian pretenses that did not come true. It is discusses the New Urbanist tradition of town planning to create community and the author provokes the reader to consider to what degree the architecture impacts the personality of the town and how a management company can shape the community. The importance of the school to Celebration is discussed in depth and highlights present day issues in education for all citizens and parents, not just those in Celebration. It is well researched and well written. For anyone who has heard the soundbites on the news about Celebration and wants an insider view, buy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Want to learn about Celebration?
Review: Andrew Ross didn't want to like Celebration. His urban friends laughed at him when he moved there to do research for this book. In the end, he liked some of the ideas behind the town, but hated the fact that it took Disney to think them up. His blind hatred for the corporate world shows up in every page of this book, so if you want to read anti-corporation diatribes, this is a dream read. But if you actually want to find out about Celebration, you'll find the book's subject curiously neglected. This is an odd beast, a book about Celebration that hardly seems to be about the town at all. For an excellent view of the town, read the other book written at about the same time by a couple who became Celebration homeowners. They have a much less knee-jerk perspective.
Rating:
Summary: A gripping discussion of Celebration's early development
Review: Andrew Ross is hardly the kind of person for whom Celebration was built. He's single, he has no children, and he's apparently an educated intellectual with an abiding love of urban life. Nonetheless, he has done a very capable, skilled job in The Celebration Chronicles. Accurate coverage of the origins and early life of Disney's town required research and synthesis of the huge number of disparate elements - for example, architecural history and Disney's plans for its corporate future - and Ross has risen to the challenge in almost every way. He does an especially good job - not surprising, for a college professor - of describing and analyzing the parents v. school war that had such an incredible influence on the town's development. Ross covers the external and internal politics, the education theory, and the human details of the school, as well as the many other, varied factors that fed into the battle. The book also displays the results of the author's wide-ranging, thorough research. Ross appears to have entered into every social circle that would have him and even a few that wouldn't. He attended every town meeting, even those where he was the only resident present. He visited many residents and talked with the full range of social groups. He even carefully documented every rumor that blossomed on the flourishing town grapevine - that chapter makes for humorous reading indeed. All of Ross's research means that this book provides a very clear picture of the range and diversity of the residents and their lives in Celebration. The book does founder a bit in the places where Ross's own leanings become too clear. His opinions - which, I'm grateful to say, are generally quarrantined in their own sections and chapters - about the town's issues are just what you'd expect from a hugely liberal educator without children. In the famed school battle, for example, his sympathy and empathy is all for the teachers and the lost innovative instruction paradigm. He appears totally incapable of understanding the parents' viewpoints, so his personal opinion is unbalanced. Overall, though, this is a well-balanced, well-written, well-researched book. Considering the depth and complexity of the topic, this is an astounding work. Absolutely worth reading and owning, even if you'd never in your life consider residing in a place like Celebration.
Rating:
Summary: an engaging discussion on the American dream
Review: Andrew Ross's, The Celebration Chronicles, is a scholarly interpretation of the neo-traditional ideal and how it manifests itself with the development of a Florida community. From the onset of the book, it appears as if Celebration is everything that the Disney executives had envisioned and everything that the residents had hoped ---- but is it? Ross, however, delays peeling back the town's veneer and instead takes us on a sight seeing tour of Celebration ---- along the way we can see palm-lined promenades, a beautiful lake, neo-traditional homes and stately designed commercial/residential buildings. The author, respectfully, gives deference to the key architectural styles ---- Anglo-Caribbean, Low Country and St Augustine. Ultimately, our travels along Market St take us to the town square and we feel somehow that Disney has delivered. Then the serious questions begin and the reader becomes privy to a host of controversies ---- shoddy home construction, the prohibitive cost to live in Celebration, conflicts over the educational agenda of the K-12 school and a questionable commitment to social and ethnic diversity.
Ross's observations may reflect an intellectual detachment. But the reader will discover that the book has its share of levity and amusing anecdotes. He notes, for example, the following ---- rumors of gypsies taking up residence and a resident heard to say, "What we need are a few drunks around this town." This book is a serious study. Forewarned ---- you won't find the vanity-fair critiques so pervasive in glossy journals and travel tabloids. What you will find, though, are the author's lengthy observations that attempt to explain all the factors ---- both positive and negative ---- that impact life in the community of Celebration. Eventually the book evolves into a valuable lesson on urban history and social science. I, as a reader, found the process of getting to this eventuality fulfilling and I recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in these topics.
Rating:
Summary: an engaging discussion on the American dream
Review: Andrew Ross's, The Celebration Chronicles, is a scholarly interpretation of the neo-traditional ideal and how it manifests itself with the development of a Florida community. From the onset of the book, it appears as if Celebration is everything that the Disney executives had envisioned and everything that the residents had hoped ---- but is it? Ross, however, delays peeling back the town's veneer and instead takes us on a site seeing tour of Celebration ---- along the way we can see palmed-lined promenades, a beautiful lake, neo-traditional homes and stately designed commercial/residential buildings. The author, respectively, gives deference to the key architectural styles ---- Anglo-Caribbean, Low Country and St Augustine. Ultimately, our travels along Market St take us to the town square and we feel somehow that Disney has delivered. Then the serious questions begin and the reader becomes privy to a host of controversies ---- shoddy home construction, the prohibitive cost to live in Celebration, conflicts over the educational agenda of the K-12 school and a questionable commitment to social and ethnic diversity.
Ross's observations may reflect an intellectual detachment. But the reader will discover that the book has its share of levity and amusing anecdotes. He notes, for example, the following ---- rumors of gypsies taking up residence and a resident heard to say, "What we need are a few drunks around this town." This book is a serious study. Forewarned ---- you won't find the vanity-fair critiques so pervasive in glossy journals and travel tabloids. What you will find, though, are the author's lengthy observations that attempt to explain all the factors ---- both positive and negative ---- that impact life in the community of Celebration. Eventually the book evolves into a valuable lesson on urban history and social science. I, as a reader, found the process of getting to this eventuality fulfilling and I recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in these topics.
Rating:
Summary: Very entertaining, Ross keeps you interested throughout.
Review: I bought this book to read on vacation while in another intentional planned community (Black Rock City) and found it to be fascinating. Ross' review is multi-dimensional; he shows that he can be both complimentary and critical of Disney at the same time. If he has an axe to grind, it doesn't show, and he gives credit where credit is due, and criticism where it is also due. It also functions reasonably well as a tutorial on urban planning and New Urbanism, a topic near and dear to everyone who lives anywhere but in the rural world. He only slips off topic occassionally, and even then not for long (and it's still interesting). I recommend you buy this book; you will be entertained and fascinated, though not necessarily in that order.
Rating: 
Summary: Celebrationites are Floridians through and through
Review: I enjoyed Ross's book for a number of reasons, especially for the light it sheds on New Urbanism and the ultimate triumph of the market over "small town" values, if such touted values ever existed in the first place (a mythology to which many Celebrationites slavishly cling). One of the most convincing parts of Ross's book is his description of the ideological battles over education that took place in Celebration during his tenure there, which Ross documents with the ethnographic clarity of Herbert Gans. So much of this resonated for me from my own experiences going to high school in South Florida, about 4 hours south of Orlando. I went to a "progressive" magnet school, Nova, in Davie, near Ft. Lauderdale, which had been cowboy country before it fell victim to an atrocious case of suburban sprawl. Nova had been designed in the early 1960s as the "high school of the future," where all future programs for Broward County would be tested out for possible countywide implementation. In the original plan, students would get coursepacks at the beginning of the semester and if they finished early they didn't have to attend classes for the rest of the year. Small specialized libraries abounded on campus; cluster groups proliferated; morning announcements were made by video--this was the 1960s, mind you!--and the school was more of a campus than a traditional high school. And the morning began at 9:30am and ended around 4:30, another huge departure from regular S. Florida schools. Nova was so highly esteemed that when my family moved to S. Florida from California in 1972, my mother put me on the "waiting list" to be tested and accepted there. I was accepted early on but my number didn't come up before 1980 (talk about reputation preceding experience!). By that point I was in my last year of middle school and decided to go to Nova the following year, to start fresh in high school in 1981. To say that by 1981 Nova had devolved would be an understatement. It still had a high reputation, and still attracted some of the brightest students in Broward County, but the curriculum itself was just like every other (except for our much-coveted 1 1/2 hour lunch break). Why? For exactly the reasons Ross identified among those anxious Celebration parents who pushed for school reforms. When I asked administrators about changes at Nova, I was told that they were made in a reactionary attempt to control student activism. By the late 1960s, the students were becoming too politically active or too "bohemian," doing their work but dropping out like flies to join the counterculture. But I think that the changes had much more to do with what Ross identifies as the initial lure of Celebration. The 1960s and 1970s saw a huge influx of Northern and Midwestern middle-class families coming to the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area to escape their native environments. These proto-Yuppies, especially from NY, NJ, and CT, demanded the same curricular changes against which Ross and the Celebrationites fought: those Gradgrind-like quantifiable methods for achieving high test scores and GPAs. I thought Nova would be a wonderland before I arrived; but for a kid like me, who does terribly on standardized tests but well on alternative assessment, the banality of Nova came as a big shock. Everyone drove a brand-new Toyota Camry or their parents' spare Cadillac, went to the mall to shop during lunch, and had set their sights not on intellectual accomplishment or collaborative innovation but on 5-year programs at the Wharton School. This was the early 1980s, after all. It wasn't until my junior year that I met all of the dour Bauhaus fans and doomed poets who were to become my comrades and co-conspirators. All this is just a way of saying that the educational battles Ross documents in Osceola County were played out in those pre-Disney spaces south of West Palm Beach decades ago. The seductions of New Urbanism notwithstanding, the story remains the same: parents move to Florida to start a new and better life, and don't want anything disturbing or challenging that vision. So while the features of this vision may be exaggerated in a place like Celebration, in many ways it's the same story for urban and suburban parents alike. When test scores and grades are the bottom line--truly education as a market economy--the pressure placed on young kids to excel at all costs will always take precedent over the need for kids to define themselves and make sense of the world around them. Sadly, this is the educational paradigm of the 1990s, and this is precisely what Ross successfully elucidates in his book.
Rating:
Summary: Intersting
Review: I had the chance to visit Celebration this spring on a trip to WDW. I found the book interesting and inciteful in learning more about this community. I believe readers will get a very well written account of life in this community at its inception as well as Ross's take on this community. A good read.
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