No comments about City Squares of the World (Architectures).

No comments about City Edge: Contemporary Discourses on Urbanism.

1 comments about Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life.

1. John Jerome has created a masterpeice, any person who enjoys thinking about physical work will delight in. Stone Work lets us in to the joys and disappointments of his life, that is, for a while centered around building a stone wall for purely aescetic reasons on his New England property. My five year old copy is in tatters.

1 comments about Academic Freedom in the Wired World: Political Extremism, Corporate Power, and the University.

1. If you are unsure exactly what "academic freedom" means, this book will probably leave you more confused than ever. Even if you are an academic freedom wonk like me, the promised "wired world" revelations really comprise only one of the ten chapters, and, as might be expected with emerging issues, their discussion remains limited, hypothetical, and speculative.
   
   And the book is an unpleasant read.
   
   The text displays more errors than one would expect from a university press, some typographic, others editorial (especially numerous redundancies) and suffers from a writing style that yoyos between proper legalese ("catalytic," "dispositive") and hyperbolic journalese ("surprisingly," "strikingly," "shockingly," and the all purpose "increasingly"). Professor O'Neil deploys the empty "troubling," "troubled," or "deeply troubling" at least 30 times in myriad contexts (he uses "myriad" over a dozen times). If only his editors had applied a healthy dose of Strunk's dicta #13, "Omit needless words" and #12, "Put statements in positive form" as O'Neil dilates on what is "not slow" or "not obscure," and what happens "not infrequently." In O'Neil's journalese, boring "Pennsylvania" becomes "The Keystone State" and dull "California" becomes "The Golden State," locutions more appropriate for Newsweek. How strange it is to read that "[t]he First Amendment expressly protects only freedom of speech and of the press, and the right of the people `peaceably to assemble, and petition the Government for a redress of grievances.'" Certainly Professor O'Neil is aware of the establishment clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;") since he refers to it elsewhere.
   
   This book is larded with anecdotes, but anecdotes are so . . . anecdotal. Sometimes they are hearsay, other times they are incomplete or even contradictory. And why does Professor O'Neil select the tales he does and remain coy about others? Academic freedom discussions are necessarily anecdotal since they usually involve a legal or administrative response to unique circumstances, but O'Neil tells us the same anecdote two and three times as though we had not just read it in the last chapter. On page 95, he asserts that in a week after 9/11, a professor "shocked his community college class by accusing his Muslim students of `killing five thousand people . . . .'" O'Neil seems to have forgotten that back on page 81 he presented the same story (though with less drama) as "reportedly" and eventually dilutes as "unsubstantiated." On page 262, O'Neil tells the story a third time only now "[the professor] never made the inflammatory statements" at all. However, the professor was placed on leave for being "less than sensitive." Curiously, Professor O'Neil opposes David Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights for fear that its call for intellectual plurality and diversity will "inhibit the rich dialogue that must take place in the classroom," What rich dialogue is there when teachers can be suspended for being "not fully sensitive?" It is just this kind of selective blindness that has called down the public censure he finds "ominous," yet Professor O'Neil dismisses or ignores the catalytic events that brought these new challenges to academic freedom. He mentions, but never discusses, university speech codes--the lay reader would have no idea what he's referring to; he makes no mention of the Berkeley Academic Senate's revised academic freedom definition which permits professorial advocacy in the classroom regarding controverted issues (such advocacy is enthusiastically endorsed by current AAUP president Cary Nelson). O'Neil refers to the necessary "dialogue" but what students complain about is a liberal and sociological monologue. My own well-documented brush with academic freedom involved a committee's attempt to hijack an entire college curriculum by forcing, for eight years, every faculty member to take a loyalty oath and "develop a knowledge and understanding of race, class, and gender issues" in every course offered by the college (including Calculus, Kafka, and Ornamental Horticulture). O'Neil is silent on these (if I may) "deeply troubling" excesses. He speaks approvingly of Alan Kors's and Harvey Silverglate's splendid The Shadow University, then goes on to dismiss most of what it documents. The curious reader is directed to www.indoctrinateu.com and www.thefire.org and www.noindoctrination.org for copious evidence of what O'Neil doesn't want to talk about.
   
   Even after grudgingly acknowledging the liberal predominance on college faculties (a ratio of 30-1 in some disciplines, notably those which most deal with controversial issues), O'Neil faults NoIndoctrination.org for publishing mostly complaints about liberal professors. What else? Where would students find a conservative professor about whom to complain? Luann Wright's NoIndoctrination.org, in my experience, is an invaluable academic freedom resource as well as the most scrupulously vetted of all the teacher evaluation sites. O'Neil also asserts that most postings on RateMyProfessors.com are negative when the most casual look shows smiley faces outnumbering frowny faces 10-1. So although O'Neil purports to investigate "the wired world," his knowledge of that world seems preliminary and skewed.
   
   Eventually, O'Neil's real agenda is exposed through his own anecdotes. In four separate places, Professor O'Neil relates three different cases in which Fox News's Bill O'Reilly defended academic freedom. Each time, Professor O'Neil expresses his astonishment. O'Neil says O'Reilly defending academic freedom is "truly startling" and elsewhere "striking, given the political creed of the speaker." Why is it "striking" when a conservative defends academic freedom? O'Neil is equally amazed that other conservatives, "Rush Limbaugh, Neal Bortz [sic], Sean Hannity, Alan Combs [sic]" have been "strangely silent on national security issues and have seldom pilloried or scape-goated left-leaning scholars . . . ." Perhaps what's really strange is how little O'Neil seems to know about conservative values (and the spelling of conservatives' names, although Alan Colmes would resist being called a conservative) and how obdurate he is about his own stereotypes.
   
   Professor O'Neil spends a fair amount of time on the case of Holocaust denier Arthur Butz who teaches electrical engineering. O'Neil explains that Butz continues to enjoy his teaching position because he is careful about keeping his personal opinions about the Holocaust out of his electrical engineering classroom. While condemning Butz's personal view, O'Neil sees his case as a moral victory for academic freedom and the necessary tolerance for even abhorrent views in the university's "quest for truth." Not really. Butz's case is not a victory for academic freedom because his opinions are not offered in academia. His case is a victory for academic responsibility which calls for electrical engineering classes to be about . . . electrical engineering, not European history. Or taken another way, it is a victory for the academic freedom of students (a concept Professor O'Neil finds . . . troubling) to receive the course described in the catalog. O'Neil even suggests that if Butz were teaching European history and expressed his denial belief, he would be removed as unfit. So his bottom line is: trust us, the system works. But it doesn't. Academic frauds like Ward Churchill prosper because of a congenial, institutionalized, dominant ideology. His academic sins were indulged, even encouraged, until his "insensitive" remarks made him radioactive. Where was the "quest for truth" in the Larry Summers case? Summers was condemned for heresy just as surely as Galileo. The taxpayer looks at the disconnect between high-minded sanctimony and actual practice and asks, "What the hell am I paying for?" And with good reason. The model for education today is not to train the intellect or educate the sensibilities but to shape social and political attitudes, an activity conducted by college professors behind the veils of academic freedom and tenure. But historically, academic freedom was yoked with academic responsibility, as the AAUP's 1915 "Declaration of Principles" makes abundantly clear:
   
   "The teacher ought also to be especially on his guard against taking unfair advantage of the students' immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher's own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters of question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness in judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own. It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues."
   
   Is this the experience of college students today? Hardly. Even Professor O'Neil admits that the AAUP's own committee on academic responsibility withered away and "no longer exists." If you are still curious about what "academic freedom" means today, FIRE, NoIndoctrination.org, and Indoctrinate U expose what the glossy college brochures conceal, and if the public now demands a look inside the sausage factory, academics have no one to blame but themselves.

1 comments about Thomas Church, Landscape Architect: Designing a Modern California Landscape.

1. This is an excellent book detailing the life and works of one of Americas most important landscape architects. There is more information than you could possibly need about his youth, his training, his business, his philosophies and his projects. There are excellent photographs of his works which explain so much more than can be described by the written word. Recommended for students, professionals and those interested in learning about the man himself and his works. This is not a coffee table book.

5 comments about Silent Screens: The Decline and Transformation of the American Movie Theater (Creating the North American Landscape).

1. This book has a lot of great pictures and does a good job of providing some history on theatres that were once important parts of the landscape and are now mostly forgotten. If you are looking for a history of the large movie palaces, there are many other books you should look at, but if you want to see a history of small town theatres with some great artwork, this is a book you need.



2. As a projectionist, I felt it my duty to research my trade in as many ways as possible, and one way was to learn about the movie palaces and hometown theatres that made my job exist.
   I actually cried as I read this book. The photos made me wish I had been around to experience these theatres in their prime.
   This book helped me to understand and respect the movie industry's history, and the history of the American hometown, far better than any factual history book ever has.
   This book also inspired me to support my local historical theatres and those around the nation. Mr. Putnam did a wonderful job on this book. The photographs are all of superb quality, and the Demolitions and Conversions Noted sections are extremely interesting. While the photos of the decaying cinemas are depressing, they also inspire one to save the historic theatres that we have left and to learn about their history.



3. I saw this exibit at the Smithsonian and loved it.



4. This is a wonderful, haunting book, which I think at least one of the previous reviewers here has missed the point of. The point is not to show these theaters in their prime, but rather, in pictures of their present state of decay, to hint at the glories that were. If you're looking for a picture book of grand movie palaces, this isn't it. But if you're looking for something that operates on a different plane, the romance of decay, and the melancholy of a world lost, this is definitely it. For all those who want to let their imaginations loose upon the ruins, this book should provide a field day.



5. This is not the first picture book of lost American movie houses, and I hope it will not be the last, but while the photo quality is excellent, the text and background leave much to be desired. It does indeed create a nostalgic empathy for its subject, those smaller structures made so famous by that memorable movie of 1971: "The Last Picture Show", and just as it featured a show house in a small Texas town, so this book favors black and white shots ("plates") of picture shows that stand as shadows of what they once were. No attempt is made to delve into the early life or the circumstances of the demise of these venues, so the photos leave the reader with much the vacant, lost, tumbling-tumble-weeds-driven-on-the-wind feeling of the movie.

   To its credit, the book does contain two 'necrologies' of sorts: the first is a four-page chapter called "Demolitions Noted" where several hundred movie houses around the nation are listed as gone, featuring, for example, an eight-page spread of the Pekin Th. of Pekin, Illinois being demolished, yet nothing is shown of it in its prime so that the reader could really appreciate that this was a unique Chinese-styled small movie palace of the 'atmospheric' (stars and clouds) type worthy of preservation. Had the author taken the trouble to locate a copy of one of the foremost books on the American movie theatre: AMERICAN MOVIE PALACES by David Naylor, he would have seen on its page 82 a photo of the Pekin Theatre in its pre-demolition prime, and then his photos of it in demolition would have had more context and impact had he sought to include this photo with his. Any research on his part would have disclosed that the photo was owned by one of the founders of the Theatre Historical Society of America which publishes a magazine of such theatre history: "Marquee", and no doubt that photo and many others could have been obtained, but neither the Society nor its magazine are mentioned in the book. Such research is what sets a quality book apart from others of lesser stature, picture book or not.

   The second 'necrology' is the chapter entitled: "Conversions Noted" which is perhaps the least depressing in the book since it shows, within its seven pages of listings, that theatres large or small can have other useful lives. An overlooked conversion was the unusual one which occurred in Milwaukee when the 1920 Riviera Th. was converted to a bicycle emporium cum velodrome with a planned bike racing track to be constructed atop the balcony and around the walls under the old chandelier positions with inverted bicycle frames supporting high intensity up-lights as the new 'chandeliers'!

   The comentaries by several notables do little to advance scholarship, something one would have expected from a book published by a university press. When the author/photographer explains in the "Conclusion" that he knew nothing of the documented locations of movie houses (few of these here could really qualify to use the term 'theatre') until someone introduced him to the standard of such guides: "The Film Daily Yearbook", it is obvious that scholarship or any real contribution to the body of knowledge was not the genesis of this work. Even one afternoon in any real library would have introduced him to the many volumes on the subject as well as magazines, and had such limited research been done, no doubt the author would have been able to do more than stumble about the towns of America hoping to find a dead show house; he could have given us some background to the origins of this genre and thus put meat on the bones of the photos, good ones though they are.

   The book's 100 some pages in the long format are nicely produced, and they may create a longing for more information so absent from this opus, in which case one is well advised to consult the landmark book which its Forward writer described as the "appropriate epitaph" of the movie house: "THE BEST REMAINING SEATS: The Golden Age of the Movie Palace" by the late Ben M. Hall (several editions available here at Amazon). "SILENT SCREENS" is a clever title, and in some depressing way it is more of an epitaph than the former title, yet it is unfulfilling, unless one is satisfied with a vagabond's jaunt with a camera down so many main streets.

No comments about The Continuing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization.

No comments about William Kent: Landscape Garden Designer : An Assessment and Catalogue of His Designs (Studies in Architecture).

No comments about Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600-1750.

1 comments about Monet's Garden: Through the Seasons at Giverny.

1. As a long time fan of impressionist art, Claude Monet and gardening, I found this book very informative. The setting is Monet's former home just outside Paris, France. The book details how the grounds were renovated under Monet's direction and how upkeep continues on the grounds today. Many of the settings such as the Lilly Pond are pictured and described in detail. This book is well worth the purchase price for Monet fans.