Jane Holtz Kay "Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back is a book about place, it is about a place (or nation) hardtopped nigh on to extinction--but a place all the same. So what stirring, moving books did I read to make me care about this place, this planet? Not a lot. Books about places are, of course, infinite. Every travelogue, every novel, many a biography, history, or what not, has a setting which creates or dwells in or on a place, of course. But remarkable, even readable, books about issues of place--what makes them work, what defines them--are as few and far between as a pedestrian bridge to paradise island. Books teaching us to learn, care, wonder, muse, crusade, construct the places we inhabit are scarcer still. For myself, the place I live in -- Boston -- was an education of the eyes: wonderful to behold and inhabit. Writings on this place and all places came later. Lewis Mumford, the eloquent bard of architecture and the city in history through many volumes; Jane Jacobs, the author of the classic crusade on the ruination of the city in The Death and Life of Great American Cities; J. B. Jackson, the great geographer and prober of place were my trinity. When I wrote Asphalt Nation's polemic, history and solutions to a nation overrun by the motor vehicle, I read anything I could grab, hardover and soft, Ph.D. thesis, magazine article or newspaper account. It helped the book, of course. It was essential research. But a writer needs to sift through something more lyrical, more eloquent, more--well--literary than the usual academic sources. So now, after my third book and two-decades-plus of journalism and architectural criticism (for The Nation), I'm back to the bookstores looking to raise my prose above performance level. In the last week or so, my search for spirited writings on place, on places, on sense of place, range more eclectically. I have leafed through a vivid portrait of Brooklyn by Ian Frazier in a "Best Essays of..." and absorbed Harold Brodkey's superb texturing of his bygone St. Louis in Extraordinary Loves, picked up at a sidewalk sale by my daughter. As for next week, all other offerings are gratefully accepted. Jane Holtz Kay Return to the Writers Read List

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