Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26982 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781861894281
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Architecture critic and CUNY professor Sorkin (Against the Wall: Israel's Barrier to Peace) sets out with the simple task of narrating the daily commute from his Greenwich Village apartment to his studio in Tribeca. The result, a book of essays that's both memoir and sociohistorical study, is anything but pedestrian. Sorkin covers a range of material, from the history of NYC tenement laws to the sociological ramifications of Disneyland to his own battle with an avaricious landlord. Taking the torch from late urban activist Jane Jacobs, Sorkin discusses the ideological function of the urban neighborhood and its citizens, particularly as an antidote to the commercializing, gentrifying, homoginizing effects of capitalism. Historical and architectural details are considered at length; the Washington Square arch, for example, was "erected to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of George Washington's inaugural," but later used by Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan "to declare the independence of the 'Republic of Greenwich Village.'" Sorkin also profiles current residents like his elderly neighbor Jane, "an active presence at the community garden" who once "propelled herself from her chair to thwart a mugging across the street." Delightful and informative, this romp will please anyone with affection for the big city.
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Review
"This walk through the city shows Michael Sorkin at his witty and knowledgeable best. From the stairs of his small apartment house to the pyramids of Chichen Itza, from Local Law 45 to the motto of the Hanseatic League, Sorkin takes us on a journey through eras and worlds in the space of just 15 blocks. Better to spend 20 minutes with him than 24 hours with a standard tourist guide!"�Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City (Sharon Zukin )

"I am glad Sorkin doesn''t take the subway: this is the most brilliant epitome of Manhattan ever written." � Mike Davis (Mike Davis )

"Not since the great Jane Jacobs has there been a book this good about the day-to-day life of New York. Sorkin writes like an American Montaigne, riffing freely off his personal experience (sometimes happy, sometimes frustrating) to arrive at general insights about New York and about cities everywhere."�Robert Campbell (Robert Campbell )

"Sorkin comes from a neighborhood of great urbanists�Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Grace Paley�and he belongs in their company. A short walk with him through the West Village turns into an adventure. He is one of the smartest and most original people writing about New York and about city life today."�Marshall Berman, author of On The Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square and co-editor of New York Calling (Marshall Berman )

"In his delightful book, Michael Sorkin writes about New York from a flaneur�s perspective. Focusing on a 20-minute walk from his apartment to his studio, the author � one of architecture�s most consistent and consistently interesting critical voices � meanders through architecture, urbanism, sociology, politics and history . . . Quirky, erudite and occasionally frustrating in its movement between the personal, the political and the physical, every city should have its Michael Sorkin."� Financial Times (Financial Times )

"Architecture critic and CUNY professor Michael Sorkin sets out with the simple task of narrating the daily commute from his Greenwich Village apartment to his studio in Tribeca. The result, a book of essays that''s both memoir and sociohistorical study, is anything but pedestrian. . . . Delightful and informative, this romp will please anyone with affection for the big city."�Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly )

"The trove of thumbnail sketches and obscure facts is augmented with fascinating ruminations about the socio-political ins and outs of the business of construction and urban renewal in New York City, the intricate socioeconomic consequences that result, and the ethical ramifications of these undertakings."� James Sclavunos, Times (UK) (Times (UK) )

"If you want an introduction to what has been said and thought about the city around the world, and also what has been built and unbuilt as a result of all this theorising, this is probably as good a guide as can be had. Follow Sorkin on his walk, and you will certainly be better informed and perhaps a bit wiser as well."� Joseph Rykwert, Architects� Journal (Architects' Journal )

"No one writes better about architecture and urbanism in the United States than Sorkin. He is a tireless campaigner against clich� . . . perhaps his most personal book to date."� Blueprint (Blueprint )

"Michael Sorkin has long been the bad boy of architectural criticism."--New York Observer (New York Observer )

"Michael Sorkin is fascinated by the myriad ways architectural details foster or inhibit community, neighborliness, safety, diversity, and intimacy. Sorkin has a light hand with history (he is never overbearing) and a worldly way with facts and anecdotes."--Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles Times )

"This book captures architect Sorkin wandering through lower Manhattan, where even the most banal-seeming sights send the author into casually fascinating digressions about urban planning, the history behind New York''s grid, stoops, and parks. After looking at the city through this ambler''s eyes, you''ll never look at a tenement building--or a stairwell--the same way again."--Time Out New York (Time Out New York )

"His architecture criticism is best understood as a series of jazz solos. In each chapter, Sorkin takes a structure or a place and riffs on it, taking the theme to unanticipated places, his lifetime of experiences as architecture professor, practitioner, critic, and world traveler all informing his work."--Daniel Brook, Next American City (Next American City )

"With this book Michael Sorkin secures his claim to succeed Jane Jacobs . . . . He brings to bear an eye every bit as acute, a pen nearly as trenchant, and a political understanding perhaps a little bit more sophisticated of the never-ending struggle over New York''s neighborhoods."--Times Literary Supplement (Times Literary Supplement )

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Walk Man
Michael Sorkin has written the best book on architecture and cities I have read in thirty years.

The groaning tables of books on architecture and its vulgar opposite, real estate, have been near collapse from useless piles of theories, career promotions, trashing old houses, freezing relics, flipping toxic properties, making tidy fortunes by deceiving yearning home buyers, and most of all boosting the pathetic dreams of new urbanists out to out-do Disneyesque fantasists.

Sorkin shows that cities are far better than they have been made out to be by defilers of the landscape who want to ruin them in order to sell new, improved cleansing soapsuds.

By walking daily from his home to studio along a small chunk of lower Manhattan, historicized Greenwich Village to tonified Tribeca, Sorkin has gestated thousands of eye-widening insights about what works in cities and what doesn't.

He gives little credit to aggressive professional planners in thrall to rich developers, instead he bestows awards on street entrepreneurs and neighborhood believers. He wonderfully and informatively describes details of large failures and small successes in New York City, the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere he has traveled to lecture and study -- many sure to start as headshaking before erupting as in belly-laughs.

Incivil discourse -- urban warfare -- gets special attention, the worst and the best, the enduring homicidal threat of infernal vehicles against pedestrians fighting for their lives. The cellphone yakkers, the widebody baby strollers, the second-hand smokers, the Formula 1 jerks in from Jersey, the national security bollards, the the homeland security aggressors, the corporate haters of trees, the venal, cruel, landlords at home and work, the fancy architects without scruple, what else have you always wanted somebody to challenge, ridicule and perfectly plan for extinction.

Sorkin handily provides tips for winning exclusive use of an elevator, what to enjoy in cities no tour guide knows, who to be forever angry at for damaging our habitats, what each of us can do to contribute to -- demand of our elected representatives, designers and educators -- places to live and thrive under our own guidance, free of orchestrated interference by exploiters of cities and their covert lobbyists and financiers.

Get this heart-warming, mind-stretching book, take a hike with Sorkin, dodge insane traffic, dump garbage in front of your landlord's office, pray for rent control to spread around the world.