Patrick Murtha
Reader
I am currently reading Lewis Mumford’s The City In History, a supreme example of what The Chronicle of Higher Education calls an “undead text”, a monumental synthesizing work of past scholarship that can find no home or even slight recognition in today’s academy because it was not written in the last ten minutes and does not reflect our current exceptionally narrow preoccupations, and thus is forced to live an underground life. The CHE’s article on this subject was amusing in the way it cited contemporary scholars who view such books as dangerous, subversive, not to be assigned and in fact to be kept a secret from today’s cohort of graduate students. No wonder our intellectual life is so thin.
A lighter but stimulating take on the urban (and suburban) environment is found in Harvard professor John R. Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places, which confirms that you can be an explorer and discoverer just walking down the street, simply by paying attention. There is so much that we don't see as we navigate our daily worlds, and this book is all about taking the blinders off. Wonderful book.
A lighter but stimulating take on the urban (and suburban) environment is found in Harvard professor John R. Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places, which confirms that you can be an explorer and discoverer just walking down the street, simply by paying attention. There is so much that we don't see as we navigate our daily worlds, and this book is all about taking the blinders off. Wonderful book.