Shameless Commerce Division

Need a holiday gift idea? My 101 Things I Learned^® books are great for college students, experienced professionals, and general readers. Each book is handsomely packaged and has 101 illustrated lessons that will orient newcomers, provoke contemplation by old hands, and give all some unexpected insights into one of seven fields—architecture, business, culinary arts, engineering, fashion, film, and law.

You can get a look inside the 101 Things I Learned^® books at the series website. They're available for purchase at B&N (all brick and mortar stores as well as online), Amazon, and most indie bookstores (including Market Block Books in Troy and Spotty Dog in Hudson for those located in the Hudson Valley).

Found in Hudson

Part of the enjoyment of a used book comes from discovering the history of the book itself. Recently I scooped up some good ones at the Hudson Library book sale. Right now I'm immersed in Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life. The inscriptions on the inside cover reveal that it was twice given as a Christmas gift: to Carl from Kate (who had read and enjoyed it), and to Jonathan from Mom (who also claims to have read it). Mom not only has great penmanship, but a sense of economy (and/or humor), as she recycled Kate's inscription as well the book. A third owner is implied, unless Mom's given name is Carl.

Also in the pile was Deborah Tannen's 1990 classic, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. Time has rendered some of Tannen's examples of inter-gender dialogue quaint, but the book nonetheless serves as an effective reminder of gender issues we still need to work on.

$7.00 netted this haul at the Hudson Library used book sale.

Inside the Tannen book I found a 1991 airline itinerary for travel between and among Minnesota, Arkansas, and Texas. According to a web search, the traveler, a member of the Dallas Brass Band, now lives in New York State. This somewhat explains how the book ended up in Hudson. On the reverse side of the itinerary were some scrawled notes. I presumed them to be the reader's thoughts on the book's content, but it's a list of words found in the text, which the reader perhaps intended to look up after his flight.

The used book store, located in the library building at 400 State Street in Hudson, will be open tomorrow and next Saturday from 10am-1pm for holiday shopping. Entrance is on the left side of the building near the parking lot.

Four books for the Hudson Urbanist

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand. A completed building is really just a best guess by its designer as to what it needs to be. It is afterward, as a building is altered by its users, that it achieves its more significant reality. By the author of The Whole Earth Catalog.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Anyone interested in understanding how cities work in everyday life should start here. Written by a Greenwich Village mother who used tools no more sophisticated than her eye and ear, the book turned the urban planning establishment upside down when it appeared in 1961. Widely regarded as the twentieth century's most important book on urbanism, it has never been out of print. 

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander et al. The authors explicate 253 "patterns" that can make our designed world work better, from the daylighting of rooms to the dimensions of porches to the arrangement of city blocks.

City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village by David Sucher. An unpretentious, extensively illustrated book with a kitchen sink of small ideas on improving urban places. Some of the ideas could have used an editor (the book is self-published), but it's nonetheless worth looking into, especially for novices and nonprofessionals.

I've linked the titles above to Amazon so you can learn more about the books, but please buy them locally if at all possible.

Who gets to control development? Part 1: SLC redux

Miriam Silverman, Stopping the Plant: The St. Lawrence Cement Controversy and the Battle for Quality of Life in the Hudson Valley. SUNY Press, 2006. 176 pages, $24.95 paperback.

I just finished Miriam Silverman's Stopping the Plant. A short book, it provides an intelligent retelling of the Hudson community's struggle against the mammoth Greenport plant proposed by Saint Lawrence Cement. But Silverman goes beyond a mere he-said-she-said rehash, illuminating how Americans' relationship to the natural environment has evolved over several centuries. Ultimately, it came to inform and shape the arguments on both sides of the SLC debate.

Early European settlers of the Americas were necessarily fearful of the natural environment, as it presented a continual threat to their well-being. Nature was seen as something that needed to be "conquered" for the sake of survival. In the industrial era, this evolved into a desire to exploit natural resources for economic development and material gain. But as our comfort became more assured, the attitude that produced it became less necessary. No longer fearful of the natural world, we became open to appreciating it aesthetically. This appreciation found expression in various endeavors, such as the Hudson River school of painting (celebrating the beauty of nature and its peaceful co-existence with humans), the national park system (formally protecting large areas of the natural environment from economic interests), and more recently the mainstream environmental movement (calling for personal accountability to nature). Such attitudes didn't evolve uniformly; those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder have perhaps (perhaps!) valued economic development over environmental aesthetics, while those on the upper rungs have had the freedom to embrace the opposite. For instance, the greater mobility of the wealthy might allow them to designate geographic areas of their choosing as worthy of aesthetic protection over economic development. Such was the label often hung on the anti-SLC faction: wealthy outsiders or recent arrivals to Hudson who aimed to impose their personal aesthetic vision on the region at the expense of Hudson's more indigenous working class.

There is plenty of room to pick nits in this model, and Silverman herself is willing to do so. As she pursues the ramifications of her model, she ultimately moves beyond it and turns to the longer term, more deeply embedded conflicts in the Hudson community. Here she finds commonality and sympathy in the needs and values of the two sides: Saint Lawrence Cement, a Swiss and Canadian company, is itself an outsider to our region. Thus, writes Silverman, "the overriding question, to which there is not always an easy answer, is who gets to determine the direction of development in the community."

Who, indeed? Stay tuned.

Shameless Commerce Division

If you are looking for a holiday gift idea, could there be a better idea out there than a book from the 101 Things I Learned book series, by yours truly? 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, one of the bestselling architecture books in the world over the past three years, has been joined by four new titles--Business, Culinary, Fashion, and Film--from Hachette Book Group. You can check them out at the official 101 Things I Learned website and purchase them at bookstores everywhere, including The Spotty Dog on Warren Street. And if you stop by my office in Hudson before the holidays, I will personally autograph your purchase for the recipient.