Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century by James Howard Kunstler

Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century Reviews

• 
  Drick

  This book puts forth the philsophy of New Urbanism, a movement within architecture and urban planning to create livable urban communities where people of all incomes , industry and retail can live in proximity to each other. New Urbanists, and especially Kunstler see the suburbs as a huge mistake in the development of communities. They advocte for walkable cities that by their structure invite people to interact with each other is an informal and spontaneous ways. They alsoadvocate for public space like plazas and parks and walkable sidewalks. the key insight I gain from this book is that physical structure influences community interaction. Living in a suburb that does not encourage walking and has no town center, I appreciate the power of his argument.
  
  The downside of the NewUrbanists is that while their principles seem egalitarian, in practice New Urbanist communities seem to be accessible only to the very wealthy. So while they promote a positive agenda, I am not sure they have addressed the problem of creating livable space for all. However, their thinking does challenge the de facto segregation apparent into today's society.
• 
  Adam

  I've always been aware that something about the way American cities look today is flawed. It was not until I read this book that I was able to fully understand the factors that made so much of the country I drove through and even lived in so ugly.
  
  I always knew I hated the suburbs on aesthetic grounds, but I thought it must have been something about the lack of trees or the fact that the houses looked the same. Turns out, while trees can improve any neighborhood, and while similar styling can in some cases take much of the beauty out of a street, the most essential factors that make a neighborhood livable and beautiful have more to do with things like the density of the housing (which is too far apart in most new developments), the amount of space in between the house front and the street (front lawns tend to detach the house from a sense of neighborhood camaraderie), the architectural sophistication (or lack thereof), and a walk-able distance to services and commercial districts.
  
  In more dense areas, there are rules of design that can determine whether a downtown is seen as a lively, desirable environment, or a corporate wasteland. Mixed-use medium density zoning, with shops on the street level and offices or apartments on top seems to be an ideal that cities have honored for millennia (see Paris, Rome, every major American city before the 1940's, etc) until Robert Moses and company decided to finance huge highway projects that uprooted entire organic neighborhoods with the purpose of encircling (entrapping) cities in a choke-hold which divided the downtown from the rest of the city. Did you know that there was even an attempt to run a highway through the French Quarter in New Orleans? The mere idea of such a historic neighborhood being mangled is anathema to anyone who has visited there. This is also what happened to Charlotte, Jacksonville, Seattle, Baltimore, Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Louisville, Tulsa, Phoenix, Nashville, and Buffalo, yet nobody seems to be up in arms about those now. We gave cars a sort of entitlement in our cities which in turn drove the need for bulldozing entire blocks for parking space. There was no incentive to develop these parking blocks, which occupy almost 70% of previously happenin' towns like Cincinnati, Detroit, Houston, and Denver, because the property taxes on these areas discourage it by taxing based on building value rather than location of property.
  
  The book delves into these causes and many others with a voice that is entertaining, clever, and often aggressively funny. Reading some of the other reviews for it, I get the impression that some of the readers took Kunstler too seriously. To me, he seems like an average Joe with an eye for civic aesthetics and the journalistic abilities to examine how those aesthetic principles have been forgotten in post-WWII American society. I never found that the book was asking me to esteem its perspective any more than I would a beloved uncle at a family gathering, lecturing me on his convictions that city planning in this country has gone to the dogs.
  
  Of course, that is not to say that he presents a hopeless view. Much of the second half of the book is devoted to stories about how the vision this book lays out in the first half has been fought for, accomplished, and rejected in different planning committees, architectural firms, and development offices in the nation. He tells stories of success, like Kentlands, Maryland, and stories of abject failure, like pretty much all of the Miami metropolitan area. He provides a fascinating look into the town dramas that play out in small towns regarding different development proposals and gives you an idea of just how disconnected the average American's conception of what an ideal American city looks like (suspiciously similar to the ideal he presents) gets from the average American's conception of what good new development should look like (aggravatingly distant from their own ideal). The overriding sense one gets from reading these stories, though, is that America is perfectly capable of embodying its own ideals of city design that it still values in the context of "old town charm" and Disney's Main Street USA. We have just gotten so used to the status quo that we have begun to fear any return to the principles of design that existed naturally before zoning laws in the times of our grandparents and beyond.
  
  I would recommend this book to anyone who is involved in city planning or development, or to anyone who has had to commute in their cars for 30 minutes every morning through traffic or grumbled about there not being enough parking. There is a better way.
• 
  Stephen Hicks

  I wanted to rate this book higher than three stars, but I couldn't do so with a clear conscience. Allow me to explain:
  
  Kunstler does a marvelous job dismantling modernity with a meticulous eye when the backdrop is urban planning and the effects of the built environment on social dynamics. Essentially the first 150 pages of the book were wonderful. I poured over his drawings and dissections of how certain architectural and urban patterns incline people to "love where they live" instead of despairing of their "homes from nowhere" (aka tract house suburbia- where I grew up).
  
  I consider myself exceptionally lucky for the pre-WWII areas of Lawrence, Kansas encapsulate every one of his diagnostic solutions to the malaise of modern city building. Here is a book that helps you begin to understand why people love Massachusetts Street just for what it is.
  
  Now for some critique- for Kunstler, urban planning and the revival of "civic art" (essentially just pretty buildings and landscapes that contribute to a coherent urban fabric) are the panaceas for modern social ailments. I find this a hard idea to swallow. I believe that cultivating a love for one's place, especially in the midst of a community that shares that love, is beneficial to beginning down a path of unity and neighborliness that transcends class, religion, race, etc. But building policies and zoning codes do not change the human heart.
  
  Second critique- past page 150, you have essentially covered the meat of his argument. Pages 151 (Chapter 6, "Beyond Seaside") to the end is an extensive coverage of real world examples of his ideas (although they are not original to him and he does not think they are). These examples are at times long and drawn out with a lot of fluff built in.
  
  All in all- I would recommend this book (the first half at least) strongly. It was extremely insightful and quite enjoyable. I look forward to wandering the streets of Lawrence with a more refined lens and a deeper love for this place I call home.
• 
  Jason

  Kunstler has assembled a well crafted, thought out, and insightful piece of vitriolic ranting against the evils of sprawl and the stupidity of the suburban U.S. mindset that has taken over much of our country. I'm thoroughly impressed by the amount of spite that the reader can feel emanating from the book as they read it - almost as if Kunstler infused each copy with a bit of his own hatred.
  
  That said, he has a lot of suggestions for making improvements - some practical, some impractical. There are copious examples of things done well, stories of success, stories of failure, and discussions of why we can't sustain our current mindset.
  
  If you're looking for a blueprint - look elsewhere such as Duany's original works, Comeback Cities, or read Planetizen. If you want concrete examples of why suburban development is moronic, and a healthy dose of spite and anger, read this book.
• 
  Annie

  I was hoping for a more educated piece on urban planning in America. Kunstler puts forth some interesting ideas, but I found his style distasteful and thesis unconvincing. The book often digresses into autobiographical narratives for which the relevancy is unclear.
• 
  Margot

  Kunstler delivers the second of his one-two punch by bringing us back from the depths of despair where he left off at the end of The Geography of Nowhere. He dishes up an additional helping of informed ranting about the current state of our social geography and public space, but also provides us with a few models for a possible solution. Kunstler has very strong, definite opinions, and he does not shy away from sharing them with you. If nothing else, this book will make you pay attention to the public and private space around you, and its effect on your well-being.
  
  I'm always interested by intersections in my reading, and the issue of suburban sprawl we're faced with today presents an interesting connection between Kunstler and another book I'm currently reading, The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. Kunstler discusses American car-worship, and Ferguson explains the financial innovation that lead to long-term, low-interest government-backed mortgages (and created the American dream of home ownership), and they both discuss the make-work WPA projects which built the roads that those cars we love drive on to the houses we could then afford to buy.
  
  The most lasting visual image I have from Kunstler is that of the typical American suburban home with the gaping hole of a garage door grinning ghoulishly. Boo!
  
  I marked lots of passages:
  "World War Two, he said, was so traumatic that it had caused the same kind of damage to western civilization that a cerebral hemorrhage can wreak on a human mind. It had made the advanced nations of the world lose some of their most important abilities, to forget their own history and culture, as a stroke victim loses his powers of speech, his memories, the particulars of his education. All the ghastly office buildings, banal dwellings, crappy commercial structures, and other common architectural garbage of our everyday world, Calthorpe proposed, were like the inchoate squawkings and bleatings of a stroke victim who had lost the ability to express himself."(15-16)
  
  "I believe that certain physical relationship work well because they are consistent with human psychological needs that are probably universal and haven't changed over time. A consideration of these issues leads ineluctably to the condition we call beauty, which for too long has been dismissed as an insoluble mystery of "taste," or worse, relegated by the academic avant-garde to the dumpster of irrelevance."(18)
  
  "The anti-urban bias in our history is real, and for pretty good reasons. Nearly everything about the rise of cities in America was a kind of industrial nightmare...They had no prior existence...There is no medieval Cleveland underlying the present city...Our cities arose out of wilderness practically overnight. Chicago grew like an algae bloom from a frontier outpost of a few thousand souls to a colossus of nearly two million in fifty years...Americans' historical experience of city life has been of a bleak, relentless, noisy, squalid, smoky, smelly, explosively expanding, socially unstable, dehumanizing sinkhole of industrial foulness congested with ragtag hordes of gabbling foreigners."(24-5)
  
  "No people on earth brag so much about their equality and no people spend so much time and energy trying to prove that they are better than the next guy...In our current national folklore, democracy exists supposedly as a system solely devoted to promoting individual liberty, the right to be left alone to pursue happiness in one's own way, to do whatever we please as we please. Any connection to some idea of the public interest is now severed. This is the position of today's 'property rights' extremists, who wish to abolish all attempts to regulate land use."(29)
  
  "It is interesting to note, though, how the concept of the American Dream mutated from a set of ideas about liberty to the more explicit notion of a suburban house as the material reward for sacrifice and honest toil. That mutation occurred in the years after World War Two, spurred by our sudden stupendous affluence and effed on by the advertising industry, especially by its operatives in televised political campaigning. Precisely when the suburban equation finally began to fail in the 1980s, when the average price of the suburban house began to exceed the ability of the average family to buy one, this notion of the American Dream mutated once again from a reward into an entitlement, something that the American Way of Life owed to the average citizen as a kind of birthright."(33)
  
  "One of the unfortunate side effects of the psychology of entitlement is the notion both among the poor and government officials that jobs must be given to idle people, and that they must be good jobs--which I take to mean something like professional careers...A troubling aspect of the problem is that menial labor is now beneath all Americans, including those who have the skills or ambitions to do nothing else. Much of what is called menial labor really involves the caretaking of things, places, and persons, and it is especially sad that there is so much to take care of in this country with nobody willing to do it."(53)
  
  "Freedom, in this culture, means that whatever makes you happy is okay. This is the freedom of a fourteen-year-old-child. Freedom to eat a whole box of donuts at one sitting. Freedom to make a mess, to be loud and obnoxious, to blow things up, to inflict injury for the thrill of it, to conceive babies without care or thought for the consequences."(60)
  
  "We have the knowledge to do the right thing; we lack only the will to do the right thing. The inescapable conclusion is that our behavior is wicked, and that we are liable to pay a heavy price for our wickedness by losing things we love, including our beautiful country and our democratic republic."(80)
  
  "Many of the drug dealers and whores naturally gravitated away because trashy people function best in trashy surroundings and, in fact, flee civic improvements like cockroaches scattering at the throw of a light switch."(165)
• 
  Jake Buller-Young

  This book has the bravado of a political memoir, complete with the irritating tone of self-righteousness that comes with the certainty that YOU know the right answer and that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid or deluded. Except in this case, the author doesn’t target an opposing party—he targets the consensus of the last fifty years of urban development.
  
  Nevertheless, I read this book to the very end and found it engaging and thought-provoking. The tone was a minor irritant, and ultimately, the polemic did its work. I can truthfully say that I have been radicalized against single-use zoning and suburban sprawl, and I’m largely convinced by the thesis of the book. So, good job, I guess? It’s worth skimming—and certainly worth practicing.
• 
  Jasmine Zulkarnain

  "The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy.
  Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy,
  the spectacle of a clown civilization.
  Sustained on a clown diet rich in sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy.
  We dress like clowns.
  We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles,
  absorbed in clownish activities.
  We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns.
  We perceive God to be an elderly comedian.
  Death, when we acknowledge it,
  is just another pratfall on the boob tube.
  "Bang! You're dead!" "
  
  
• 
  Nicole Robinson

  When Kunstler first published this book I was a teenager growing up in a midwestern exurb. So much of what he captures in this book and in Geography of Nowhere I understood at that time but couldn't articulate. I wish I had read these books 20 years ago.
  
  I didn't. I read them in 2021 and while everything he wrote about New Urbanism, TOD, planning and architecture is still very much relevant today he also made some statements that haven't aged well in regards to black parents, orphanages and women. Hence the 3 star rating. This is not an issue in Geography of Nowhere, I will note.
• 
  Cameron Dougal

  His cynical tone is a bit hard to stick with at first, like listening to an old man grumble page after page about the way things should be. It is satisfying, though, to have somebody rag on all the things that felt slightly wrong about my own experience in suburbia, like scratching an itch that I didn’t know I had. This book changed my mindset about the way we’ve developed America. The us-vs-them attitude just doesn’t seem like the most productive way to analyze why people resist change.
  
  I also didn’t get much out of anything past chapter 8.
  
  I’m glad I read it but I wouldn’t pick it up again any time soon unless I need a quote.
• 
  Anna

  "Suburbia is well suited to children in the single-digit phase of development when their needs are...accessible places to play games of their own invention...
  "Suburbia is set to tank out. It's laughably flimsy components were meant to be thrown away."
  
  This guy is my kindred spirit.
• 
  Patrick Hanlon

  JHK's mix of snark, passion and sound reasoning make for a compelling fun read about urbanism and what we've gotten wrong and how little it would take to benefit from getting things right.
• 
  Stephen

  "History doesn't believe anybody's advertising." (p.1)
  
  
  
  James Howard Kunstler penned The Geography of Nowhere in an attempt to answer the question: why is America so obscenely ugly? His answer came in the form of a cultural history of the United States, one that introduced lay readers to urban planning and enticed them with its relevance to their lives, not to mention Kunstler's playfully vicious style. As much ground as it covered though, and as hilariously as Kunstler excoriated suburban sprawl and modernist building, he offered no solutions to the problems he detailed, except for the hope that oil would peak and destroy the entire rotten system. Home from Nowhere follows in Geography’s footsteps, demonstrating how communities can be restored and are being restored– and elaborating on why he is hopeful for our future.
  
  Home from Nowhere is less a book in its own right, and more a continuation, or a fulfillment, of The Geography of Nowhere. It begins by repeating Kunstler’s basic criticisms of the unraveling of America’s urban fabric, detailing his beef with the suburban sprawl which replaced traditional cities. Kunstler’s perspective is different than that of Chuck Marohn (Strong Towns) or Andres Duany (Suburban Nation). While those authors focus on sprawl as a financial loser, Kunstler examines planning from a more humanistic perspective, probing into how traditional and planning both effect us, as people. Crucial to Kunstler's view of urbanism is a sense of "place". Traditional neighborhoods and cities have this sense of place: they have clear centers and edges. They can be defined. Sprawl, however, is a seemingly endless and stultifyingly homogenous expanse of asphalt and neon -- a desert of concrete that engenders feelings of lostness and despair in those trapped in it.
  
  Home builds on Geography first in providing ample illustrations -- not photographs,but attractive and elegant sketches which demonstrate architectural or planning concepts (like symmetry and proportion) or by depicting streetscapes and homes which can be emulate. Some chapters elaborate on the problems which inhibit the restoration of American urbanism, like real estate taxing policies ("A Mercifully Brief Chapter on a Frightening, Tedious, but Important Subject") that discourage the erection of fine buildings and promote instead the conversion of downtown into parking lots. The remaining third of the book is dedicated to covering the travails and triumphs of not only new urbanist planners like Andrues Duany and Peter Calthorpe designing communities, but concerned citizen-politicians who have been laboring to effect changes in their own cities, restoring traditional neighborhood development. Part of Home is a response to the criticism of new urbanist projects that most of them have consisted of greenfield development -- new development far from city cores, in effect creating much better suburbs but suburbs all the same. Working within existing cities means constantly struggling with minds locked into old thinking. This argument is dated now, of course: since the bubble burst in late 2007, the new urbanists have been focusing on infill, on reactivating dead spaces inside cities. The wind is blowing in the direction of urban restoration, and Home from Nowhere chronicles its beginning.
  
  Although the recap of The Geography of Nowhere means that Home could be read by itself, Kunstler argued so well before that the first third seems watered down in comparison. The encouraging work he reports on is a welcome addition to the jeremiad-like Geography, though, and recommends itself to those concerned about the shape of America's cities. Kunstler's own personality imbues the narrative with strength: he's an interesting man, pining for a lost world of decorum, virtue, and grace and wanting to see it restored -- first through the built environment.
  
• 
  Peter

  This is the type of idealistic, polemical book on post-WWII architecture that I find very irritating.
  
  Looking back on the choices of the previous generation and deciding that they must have been in some kind of drunken stupor is a very low blow. Simply because the design choices that were in use in the 50's are not compliant with those that the writer favors does not mean that those older designs are necessarily the work of drunks.
  
  Yes, there are problems with suburban tract housing. However, I refuse to believe that large numbers of the 50's generation were in a drunken stupor because they were so bored with their lot in life after having such a great time in WWII. Perhaps Mr. Kunstler has taken John Cheever stories too seriously ? Veterans of WWII may have been nostalgic about their service, but I would think that they were perfectly happy not to be shot at and instead would prefer to "flip burgers and wieners in a joke bedizened apron and a clownish chefs hat"
  
  When the WWII veterans came home, they wanted jobs, houses, and happy families. Yes, not all of them, but a lot of them. How were those millions of people supposed to be housed ? Were they going to return to their parents homes and apartments in the cities ? Or maybe the family farm ? No, they wanted their own home. Millions of them had to be built, and built quickly. So of course lots of those houses were not great works of art.
  
  Perhaps we can move forward and work with the advantages of the suburbs instead of insulting our grandfathers wholesale.
  
• 
  Anna

  Kunstler is angry about the terrible state of the American built environment, and expounds his anger with conviction. Reading this book as a British person makes you profoundly grateful that the UK has not succumbed to the same degree of car-dependent suburban sprawl as the US. This is not to say that the British built environment is uniformly or even mostly excellent. What struck me, though, is that the UK still uses our urban centres, albeit not always well, and does not require commercial buildings to be single storey. Indeed, does any development build single storey structures in the UK? It seems like such a waste of space. I suspect that the UK has resisted suburban sprawl in part thanks to greater population density historically, and in part due to a strain of traditionalism that manifests in carefully protected green belts. On the other hand, Kunstler's comments about the tedious homogeneity of design in new developments, especially housing, definitely ring a bell on this side of the Atlantic.
  
  'Home from Nowhere' treads an interesting line between social science and reportage. It's an engaging read and, although written 16 years ago, very much still relevant. In my mind, it fits nicely with the non-fiction books that preceded 'The Wire' ('The Corner' and 'Homicide'), which expound the inner urban problems of the US much more effectively. Kunstler wobbles somewhat when discussing them, but vividly and trenchantly deconstructs the suburbs.
• 
  Chris

  This book was probably responsible for getting me back into the issues concerning the health of our environment and the economy. I am an old hippy who saw the writing on the wall back in the 70's and I guess I believed that enough people in our country had seen the light, created the EPA etc. and everyone knew what we needed to do. I went to school, got married, had children, went to work. We focused on someday getting some land to grow healthy food and live lightly on the planet. One friend went to work for Mother Earth News. Others became artists and carpenters and craftspersons. We were surrounded by people who thought like we did.
  
  Then one day realized that the rest of society wasn't following along. There were several cracks in the picture. This is when you go into denial but in the back of my mind I was frightened. Twenty years later I saw Kunstler talk. I got some of his books and I'm back fighting for our future if it is not too late. In this book, Kunstler points out where we went wrong and how we designed a lifestyle and system based on the automobile and fossil fuels, that is unsustainable and will be difficult to rework.
  
  Kunstler is a good writer, pleasant to read and very informative, with examples and possible answers.
• 
  Sabrina

  A borderline muckracking analysis of the state of architecture, suburbia, and small towns, Home From Nowhere succeeds in holding the reader's focus hostage so he or she may meet the perils of the auto-dystopic America we've come to inhabit.
  
  This is a fantastic and tantalizing read that will jibe well with any spent soul that resides in a suburban wasteland. If I may digress and carp, however, I'll note that the author has an overt tendency to descend into trenchant rebukes of soulless suburbia, which is justifiable, but rare in a nonfiction work. Instead of unleashing a blizzard of facts, Kunstler relies on well-argued but one-sided essays to detract from the kitschy glamor of places like Disney World, and this WILL isolate some readers. The degree of passion is unmistakable though, so pick it up.
• 
  Shawn

  This book is somewhat of a bridge between the preceding book called The Geography of Nowhere and Kunstler's book The Long Emergency which came out a few years ago. I found that it lacks the informativeness of these other two books, in addition to being a bit unclear on how it adds to what was already written in The Geography of Nowhere. But it is still enjoyable reading if you like JHK's rants about American social life - his hilarious quasi-philosophical zingers ridiculing the modern American psyche are particularly good in this book.
  
  The one upshot of this book I didn't notice in the others, or didn't appreciate, was that JHK does have the ability to make some quite beautiful turns of phrase, which do in places really nicely convey the poetic experience he finds to be missing in the practices of American community and social life; I guess this is his novelist voice coming out.
• 
  Bob Matter

  A more-or-less sequel to his "The Geography of Nowhere", this offering is not as compelling, but still a worthwhile read for those interested in urban planning and land usage. As I mentioned in my review of TGoN, Kunstler would benefit from some elemental political economy training from one of the Henry George Schools to learn how Land Value Taxation would solve the problem of sprawl amongst others. Before reading any books on urban planning one should perhaps read the modernized abridgment of Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" by Robert Drake.
• 
  Michael

  A follow up to Kunstler's Geography From Nowhere, though the first one I read (I'm a bit backwards after all), this continues his general rant against evil sprawl with, I seem to recall, some focus towards the future. I agree with his opinions about the malaise of cities and towns in the face of big-boxes and strip centers, but I feel his attitude towards modern/contemporary architecture is simplistic at best.
• 
  Janie

  An outspoken critic of sprawl, big box stores, and god-awful architecture, Kunstler rants away in this book, a lot like I often do about our souless modern landscape. The author digs into how the economy, the automobile, politics, and corporations helped erode aesthetic and civic unity in public spaces, but it also offers solid solutions. Knustler can veer into a snide tone, but I forgive him. His point is hard to ignore.
• 
  Nicole Powell

  Loved it, this book is a must read! He is witty, but has a strong point - it is sad to really look at the landscape of America - it is suburbia and it truly feels like nowhere. It was interesting to read about the history and how our country has ended up this way, it is sad, but makes me want to work for the change this country needs - moving away from suburbia and back to traditional planning, mixed use/income, public transit - get people out of their cars and walking again!
• 
  Beth Barnett

  Sequel to Geography of Nowhere. This book isn't as good as the first, but is worth reading if you liked Geography of Nowhere. It covers some of the same topics and branches out into examples of New Urbanism, a movement in architecture, urban planning, and landscape planning that at least attempts to be pedestrian and environment-friendly.
• 
  Keith Akers

  I learned that cars are really bad for America in some subtle ways that you might not appreciate, even if you're disposed to be anti-car, just because the car culture is so ubiquitous. This is less well-known than the "Geography of Nowhere" but it's better because Kunstler goes into how a better system would work.
• 
  Botanist nelson

  a great follow-up to The Geography of Nowhere. published in 1995, it's an extremely prescient presentation of the blight of suburban (and exurban) sprawl that is finally on the radar of national problems. kunstler was ahead of his time. "town center" have caught on -- some are that in name only, while others truly strive to become a true neighborhood. he lays out the
• 
  Brian

  I stumbled upon this book in doing some research of the effects of suburban sprawl in the local church. I found it to be am informative read, though the chapters are more episodic in nature rather than building a cohesive whole. I sense that one would do better to read Kunstler's preceding book on the same subject.