Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century
James Howard Kunstler

Published: 1998, Touchstone Books
ISBN: 0684837374

OUR REVIEW (Reviewed September 26, 2000, by Bill Pinkovitz)
In Home from Nowhere, James Kunstler continues his no-holds barred critique of the American urban environment. This time, he offers several practical solutions to help cure the ills of the American suburbs. This sequel to The Geography of Nowhere begins by offering two only somewhat tongue-in-cheek theories to explain how "America has become such an abysmal mess."

The first, The Stroke Theory, is based on the premise that World War II was so traumatic to the American psyche that, like a stroke, it caused people to forget their history and culture. The result:"The ghastly office bulidings, banal dwellings, crappy commercial structures, and other common architectural garbage of our everyday world."

The Stupor Theory also has its roots in World War II. For many veterans, World War II was the adventure of their lifetime. Returning home after "drinking seventy year-old cognac in and Alsatian castle with a pistol strapped to your hip and a French cutie on your lap to a life selling breakfast cereal, mowing the lawn, and barbecuing put many veterans into a permanent semicoma." Their only solace: heavy doses of martinis. The result: "the suburban sprawl universe--incoherent, brutal, ugly and depressing.

Kunstler provides a brief history of how we created the suburban world in which many of us live and bluntly describes what is wrong with it. He provides severeal examples of how the New Urbanist approach is helping us create better places to live.

One may not agree with all of Kunstler's observations or solutions, but Home from Nowhere will make you reexamine where and how mnay of us live.