an ambitious treatise that combines stories from daily life in Syria with observations of cities such as Detroit, Helsinki, Bristol, Beirut, Dubai, and Amsterdam. Here is the next installment of "Book Briefs," the series of occasional posts featuring short first-hand descriptions of some of the numerous books that publishers send to me for consideration on this blog. Obviously, these briefs are not full-blown reviews, but they are a way to share more books worthy of attention than those that end up as long reviews.
American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life by Richard K. Rein | Island Press | January 2022 | 6 x 9 inches | 352 pages | $35 | Amazon / BookshopThe multi-faceted writer, urbanist, and sociologist William "Holly" White was known to a general audience and architects/planners, respectively, for two books: The Organization Man, a 1956 bestseller about the culture of the corporate workplace; and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, the 1980 book that became required reading for architecture students learning how to design spaces for the way people actually use them. Richard K. Rein's enjoyable, thorough biography of Whyte tries to make sense of his subject's varied interests, which also included historic preservation and environmental conservation, and, not surprisingly, finds overlap in these two seminal books. "An effective business can learn from good public places," Rein ...