Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places

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Summary: Quick, wonderful read - filled with wonder!
Review: A fantastic little book that will remind you of wonder, make you wonder at the world around you, and help you stop ignoring the variety and patterns to which we've become numb.

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Summary: New Age History
Review: I had heard Stilgoe on a recent NPR show, and was looking forward to reading his observations about our changing built environment. While there is a smattering of interesting information (i.e., the fact that AC and DC currents once vied with each other in homes), the majority of it is so much fluffy, new agey, and poorly written observations. For the same price, I recommend a much more complete and fascinating book about observing change, "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand. It's spectacular.

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Summary: Fragmenties?
Review: John Stilgoe once again captures the imagination of the reader and encourages us to truly "see", not just "inhabit" the world that lies all around us.

As in his other works, he teaches us that history and archaeology are not just a part of musty museums, but of the every day built environment. There is a history behind everything that we come across in our daily lives and he wants us to take a second as a child might and think about the environment in which we live.

Having had the opportunity to take classes he taught at Harvard, this book enabled me to reenter his world of delicate insight and deep knowledge about what many in our society simply overlook or have forgotten.

If you like pop culture, history, walking down forgotten railroad beds or simply enjoy driving down unknown roads, Stilgoe will capture you.

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Summary: pulling edges to the center
Review: Mr. Stilgoe may be, for others, a good guide to exploring the environment as modified by man, but for me his tone and careless treatment of facts are offputting.

First--tone: He uses the personna of "the explorer" throughout, the explorer walks and bikes and examines lines (electric, telegraph, telephone, fence), roads, towns, etc. The explorer is definitely urban and politically liberal. That doesn't bother me, but the constant certitude does. Because the "explorer" is an abstraction there's no humanity for the reader to identify with as a counterweight when the explorer's facts are wrong. (Compare him with Mr. Edward Hoagland in "Compass Points" who explicitly takes positions and is very, very human. You respect the man even though you disagree with his views.)

Second--what facts do I consider wrong? * Differences over fencing did not contribute to the Civil War. * The Constitution does not prohibit road building, it explicitly (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) gives Congress the power to establish post-offices and post roads. As I was taught in high school history, Congress appropriated money to build the "National Road" in Jefferson's administration. (I did have to doublecheck my facts by doing an Net search.) *Although there were legitimate military benefits to the interstate highway system, in Mr. Stilgoe's tale "Congress built the system as a weapon, as a military highway, because it feared the enduring power of the constitutional prohibition against building ordinary roads." [p. 96] * Stilgoe also falls for the urban legend (see http://www.snopes.com) that the roads were planned to be used as emergency landing strips for B-52's.

It's a tribute to the clear writing and the different subject matter that I finished the book.

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Summary: Fascinating and Enervating
Review: Possibly the most fascinating book I have read since Carl Sagan's "The Dragons of Eden". How often do you read a book that makes you want to get up off your chair (perhaps taking the book with you if you haven't finished yet) and wander off for outside adventures with its tantalizing accounts of what you will find in your neighborhood and town, and their outlying areas?!

Stilgoe draws us out into the "real world" page by page in this exploration of the modern world around us, its intriguing history of urban and rural constructions, and what it all means. A great book especially in that once you have read it, it continues giving to you as you take what you have learned from it and go further into the everyday world with it.

Talking about this book practically makes me jump up and down with excitement over the possibilities. No, wait -- it's LITERAL! I am, in fact, jumping up and down.

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Summary: author has a superior attitude
Review: The author gives the impression that he is superior to the rest of us - indeed, that he is the only one who notices the skeleton behind everyday things in our environment. Does he really find such desolation of spirit as he bikes around America? I'm glad I read the librarycopyof this book instead of buying it as I had intended to do, based on a review in the New Yorker magazine.

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Summary: Its a Start...
Review: This book should please anyone who enjoys spending time walking, in-line skating, or bicycling around the margins of the landscape that Americans have crafted (and often later abandoned or forgotten) during the last few centuries. Stilgoe seems to believe that such casual observation is a far rarer pastime than I suspect it is (and perhaps that it should be less a mere pastime than a virtuous calling).

That doubtless accounts for the excess of zeal that I think has crept into his text. Stilgoe is unquestionably right, however, that further inquiry into the little puzzles encountered in these marginal landscapes will reward anyone with a mildly inquisitive bent. Stilgoe himself rewards the reader with insights into the interplay of diverse forces that can be read in the patina of an inhabited landscape (e.g., the less-than-obvious relationship between a townscape of tree-lined streets and an economic base sufficient to support municipal fire-suppression services).

I doubt that Stilgoe was trying to prescribe a program of action to "rescue" or "restore" the landscape, or in fact to do anything but to "regain awareness," as the subtitle puts it.

Should this book be the start for a reader interested in such things? The story that Stilgoe tells about the experience of close observation should make it an accessible beginning. But some readers might wish to begin with one of the other writers and scholars closely associated with observation of the American landscape, e.g.:

Grady Clay's "Close-Up, How to Read the American City" (1980), "Right Before Your Eyes: Penetrating the Urban Environment " (1987), and "Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape" (1994)

John Brinckerhoff Jackson's "Discovering the Vernacular Landscape" (1986), "A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time" (1994), and "Landscape in Sight: Looking at America" (1997)

James Howard Kunstler's "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape" (1994) and "Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century" (1996)

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Summary: Guide to interacting with the visual environment
Review: Though you may get more detailed info on some of the specific subjects covered in this book, the point really is that if you get out on foot or bicycle you can begin to relearn visual acuity. It is not the end all be all guide to the visual landscape but rather a call to arms. Most people wonder at the keen perception demonstrated by observers in previous centuries, Stilgoe spells out why we have lost this and how we may regain it. His chapters are inticements and not academic. For proof of Stilgoe's total mastery of landscape history read any of his previous works. I can't think of a similar book on the market today that addresses the urban landcsape, the everyday and does not romanticize the wilderness "preserves" of the park service. Excellent. Don't read it unless you plan to get off your butt.