Brief Reviews Of Books New to the Shelves of the CLUI
Library
The CLUI has been expanding the range of
titles we offer in our bookshop, adjacent to the gallery space
in our Los Angeles location. We now feature books published
through The Center for American Places, a nonprofit organization
based out of Harrisonburg Virginia, that believe that “books
can provide, perhaps better than any other medium, the intellectual
and affective foundation for comprehending geography and place.”
Since 1990 the Center for American Places publishing division,
in association with university presses including Johns Hopkins
University Press, has produced more than 140 titles, in their
categories of American Land Classics, Creating the North American
Landscape, and The Road and American Culture. We, at the CLUI,
feel that their stated mission, “to enhance the public’s
understanding of the natural and built environment,” is
compatable with ours, and we are delighted to have the opportunity
to provide their books to a CLUI audience.
-Sarah Simons, CLUI Publications Manager
Terry Evans, 1998, paperback, 100 pages, $29.95
The vast Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie Park, located 40
miles southwest of downtown Chicago, was created in 1997 on
the site of the Joliet Army Arsenal, which was once the world’s
largest TNT factory. Landscape photographer Terry Evans explores
the remnants of America’s military-industrial complex on
a remediated environment and the transformation of a former
military base into a unique nature preserve and public recreation
area, in this book of beautiful color photographs. The introductory
essay by Tony Hiss includes historical photographs of a place
which once “produced every week the explosive equivalent
of 290 atomic bombs similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima.”
Martin V. Melosi, 2000, hardcover, 578 pages, $59.95
This book examines water supply, wastewater, and solid-waste-disposal
systems in U.S. cities from the colonial era to the present
day. Solutions to the problems of sanitation, water delivery,
and wate removal, from the horse-drawn Studebaker patent Uniform
Pressure Street Flusher to the Hyperion Waste Water Treatment
Plant are explored, as well as the changes in how Americans
view waste and sanitation in urban life, and the modern issues
of decaying infrastructure, recycling, and demand for available
land for disposal sites.
Bob Thall, 1999, paperback, 100 pages, $24.95
The seemingly abandoned corporate office parks, townhouse developments,
strip malls, and model homes in this book of haunting black
and white photographs seem to exist in an empty hushed world
full of mysterious meaning. Thall has created an austere beauty
from the extreme banality of a place where, he writes, “Everything,
for hundreds of square miles, looked much the same to me. The
lack of trees, the cheap standardized construction, the ceaseless
flow of cars, the acres of blacktop and concrete, and the unwalkable
distances across open, flat land would leave me with an overwhelming
and chilling sense of desolation.”
Frank Gohlke, 1992, paperback, 105 pages, $29.95
The Midwest is characterized by the spaciousness and the flat
emptiness of the landscape, and, rising from it, enormous grain
elevators, which “... announce the presence of a town and
explain, in great measure, the function of its inhabitants.”
The photographer Frank Gohlke has pondered and documented this
relationship for the past two decades, and the black and white
photographs in this book cover the period of the mid-1970s.
His introductory essay discusses the pervasive mystique these
large structures have, and how the area has changed since these
photographs were taken. A concluding historical essay by John
C. Hudson examines the development and function of the grain
elevator and its geographical and economic role in Anerican
life.
John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, 1999, hardcover, 394 pages,
$34.95
The rise of car culture encouraged “eating on the run,”
and this book, by the authors of The Gas Station in America
and The Motel in America, explores the origins, architecrture,
and commercial growth of wayside eateries in the United States
over the past 100 years. Organized in chapters such as “Ice
Cream Places,” “Chicken Places,” “Pizza
Places,” the book comprehensively explores the array of
eateries available to the American traveler, from the novelty
stands and architectural imaginitiveness of the 1950s, to the
current day, where “intentional sameness of design ‘welcomes’
every interstate driver.”
Stanley Greenberg, 1998, hardcover, 90 pages, $29.95
With a 4x5 monorail view camera and using only available light,
Stanley Greenberg’s black and white photographs of sites
in New York City’s boroughs offer a dark and poetic view
of the hidden and often abandoned infrastructure of the area.
As Thomas H. Garver points out, in his introductory essay, “the
result is a body of photographs that peer into deep space, usually
surrounded by a powerful structural framing element of stone,
steel, or concrete.” This elegantly designed book illuminates
the monumental and tragic beauty of these stark images.
Laurie Brown and Martha Ronk, 2000, paperback, 94 pages, $24.95
Laurie Brown’s panoramic black and white photographs of
the vistas of displaced earth from development projects and
housing developments in southern Califonrnia, are prefaced by
poems by Martha Ronk, forming an evocative and almost elegiac
view of these dehumanized but profoundly shaped-by-human tracts
of land. The long narrow format of this book and rather small
size of the sixty images heighten the intensity of the photographs,
causing one to feel that one is viewing the still aftermath
of cataclysmic destruction.
Michael Putnam, 2000, hardcover, 102 pages, $39.95
In the early 1980s Michael Putnam began photographing closed
theaters, theaters that had been converted to other uses, theaters
on the verge of collapse, theaters being demolished, and vacant
lots where theaters once stood. The once ubiquitous single-screen
movie theater is all but gone, and this book documents that
vanished world through Putnam’s photographs, and essays
by Peter Bogdanovich, Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, Robert Sklar,
and others.
Cotton Mather and George F. Thompson, 1995, hardcover, 94 pages,
$19.95
This book is the first volume in the Center for American Places’
Registered Places of America series, which attempts to explore
the idea of place as the means to appreciate and comprehend
a region or a state. Thirty one places in New Mexico are examined
in this attractive book, for their beauty, historical and geographical
significance, and architectural and cultural heritage.
John A. Hird, 1994, paperback, 315 pages, $16.95
The author, an environmental policy and public policy analysis
professor, analyses the multibillion dollar federal hazardous
waste cleanup program established in 1980, known as Superfund,
in all of its controversial aspects. After examining the conflicts
between risk experts and the public over the severity of Superfund
site hazards, and the complicated politics involved in the Superfund
program, he recommends policy reforms.
David Charles Sloane, 1991, paperback, 293 pages, $19.95
Cemeteries in America have gradually changed from churchyards
to suburban memorial parks, from sacred refuges to business
ventures, and their role as a cherished repository of history
and memories has been usurped by historical societies and family
albums. This book, illustrated with black and white photographs,
traces the cemetery’s rich legacy from colonial times to
the twentieth century.
