Rating: 
Summary: gee if only life could be this swell, NOT
Review: a friend sent me this, just because i have moved to vancouver. it sounds like a cheap travel brochure. hitting just the right pretty pictures along the way. ugh! i agree with most of the other reviewers. this white middle aged guy pops into town. chats with a few folks and leaves with just enough tourist info to choke someone. rule # 1. living in a place is always different than visiting. he even makes homelessness sound like fun. what a load of crap. and very dated info.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting
Review: Full of interesting off beat information about a group of towns the author visits and rates according to his unique scale. Fun to read especially if you have visited any of the areas.
Rating:
Summary: Why?
Review: I don't understand the point of this book. Pindell visits various smaller cities that are unique, then proceeds to sing their praises in a book which is designed to encourage people to move to them which, in turn, only helps to destroy the very qualities that make the special. Why does Pindell wish to do this? What did any of these towns do to him?
Rating:
Summary: Inaacurate
Review: I used to live in one of the towns that is discussed in this book. In fact, I was living there at the time the author made his visit(s), and I can honestly say that his research was sloppy at best. Pindell mentions events that never took place, gets the names of town officials and areas in town wrong, and confuses several other facts. If he bungled the job on this one chapter, I can only imagine how inaccurate all the others are.
Rating: 
Summary: coast to coast navel-gazing
Review: Pindell's book is not about visiting a number of places in America and comparing how livable they are. He's already got some ideas about what makes a place livable, and doesn't set out to challenge them in the least. He visits a handful of cities and towns, talks to some people he meets in bars, and moves on. He doesn't consider any large cities. He's mostly interested in how people like him (middle aged, middle class, white collar, married with children) will find the area.As an unmarried, childless person in my 20s, I found this book next to useless.
Rating: 
Summary: Weighing Priorities
Review: Terry deals with the important category of opportunities for community beyond the boundaries of home and work. The book is a treasure of thought on the value of "third places". Using several towns and cities as a way to consider how human connection needs can be met, he encourages thinking about one's own priorities for the place called home.
Rating:
Summary: Weighing Priorities
Review: Terry deals with the important category of opportunities for community beyond the boundaries of home and work. The book is a treasure of thought on the value of "third places". Using several towns and cities as a way to consider how human connection needs can be met, he encourages thinking about one's own priorities for the place called home.
Rating:
Summary: What Makes a Place a Good Place
Review: The theme of this book is an exploration of what makes a place "good". The particular towns and cities Pindell chooses to visit are not so important. I suspect that some readers may not get this, which is a shame because A Good Place to Live : America's Last Migration is insightfull, well written, and one of the best books on the subject of place. By exploring the govermental, social, economic, and enviornmental factors of a number of "good" towns and cities. Pindell allows us to understand what we're looking for in our very own Good Place.
Rating:
Summary: Cities that Work
Review: This book is an exploration into the factors behind successful American cities. Pindell began with the question "Where is a good place to live?" In his travels across the country, this question was often the topic of conversations that he struck up with fellow travelers. Surprisingly, despite the thousands of possible answers, many of the people he asked came up with answers from the same short list of cities. With this list in hand, Pindell set off across the country again to visit each city. He wanted to see if the cities' reputations as great places to live were justified, and he also wanted to see if he could identify some common factors that these liveable cities all shared. In this book, Pindell describes his visits to cities as diverse as Santa Fe, Seattle, Kelowna (British Columbia), Portland, New Hampshire, and Wilmington, North Carolina.
In virtually every city he visits, Pindell starts off in a bar in search of what Ray Oldenburg terms a "third place" (after home and work) where people congregate to socialize with others. He strikes up conversations with locals and tourists alike, meets with local politicians and frequently talks with street people. He makes a point of trying to identify unofficial leaders in the community. He questions each of these people about the quality of life in the city, the problems and threats to continued success, and asks them to list what factors have made the city so liveable. To facilitate comparison between cities, he establishes something he calls the 10,000 Waves Scale: the Cheers Factor (ease of sociability), the Foot Factor (how well one can get around without a car), the Cake factor (proximity to cultural amenities), the Comfort factor (pleasantness of the climate), and the Fudge Factor (a purely subjective feeling about the place).
Along the way, Pindell makes some interesting observations. He notes that in order for a place to be a great place to live, it needs to have a continual infusion of new blood. That is, the newcomers have to outnumber the natives. He also notes that even while he was writing this book, the number of good places swelled "not because people are discovering good places, but because they are making them." At the end of the book, Pindell summarizes some common factors that good places share, which include: pedestrian friendliness, thriving residential neighborhoods adjacent to downtown, and ownership of downtown properties by merchants. The book includes a short bibliography and an index.
Overall, I found the book thought-provoking as well as informative. The beginning chapters of the book can be rather heavy and repetitive with their simple descriptions of Western cities. In the East, however, Pindell takes a different approach, exploring cities that may not be entirely great places to live, but have certain aspects of particular interest, such as the historical development of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, or the campaign against drug dealers in Charlottesville, Virginia. The book is very weighty with prose-perhaps a more concise presentation might have made the points stand out more, but it also would have limited the scope of the journey.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Read
Review: Well written, an interesting exploration of Americans constant quest for "a good place to live". The author takes the reader from West Coast to East with stops in the middle. Recommended
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