Outside lies magic

New Yorker

Stilgoe writes like someone letting you in on a really cool secret — several secrets, in fact — as he teases out the hidden meanings behind often overlooked features of our cities and towns. Along the way, he explains why railroads are coming back, how stores evolve in shopping plazas, and the obscure relationship between the cost of fire insurance and the layout of Main Street. In Stilgoe's world, you don't have to go very far to be an explorer if you pay the right kind of attention.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845, Stilgoe brilliantly traced the history and the meaning of man's imprint on the American environment. His new book, as informal and chatty as Common Landscape was scholarly, looks at the physical state of America today and encourages his readers to become 'Explorers': unhurried, clear-eyed observers of the world they rush through. The book is wildly uneven -- the section on motels, for instance, does little more than belabor the obvious and the repeated refrain to 'Open Your Eyes and Look Around' becomes hectoring, but when Stilgoe lets his imagination run free, the results can become breathtaking.

The chapter on interstate highways touches on such things as what's written on the backs of signs, the dirt tracks that parallel expressways, roadkill and what happens to it, and what seemingly random patches of wild flowers may really signify. Perhaps the best chapter deals with fences and other ways people draw lines across the landscape to mark boundaries or create the illusion of privacy. Stilgoe calls this a 'straightforward guidebook to exploring' whose purpose borders on the evangelical, but it's the sort of book that makes the reader want to buttonhole anyone handy and say, 'Listen to this.'

Library Journal

Without the usual accretions of academic writing, the author, a respected Harvard architectural and landscape historian, attempts a highly personal narrative, calling for his readers to become more aware of the quickly disappearing world around them. Stilgoe manifests keen observational skills on his diverse, peculiar topics -- utility and rail lines, postal service, interstate highways, fences, small-town main streets, and motels. Disappointingly, however, his collection of brief essays fails to deliver an integrated whole. The text, written from the perspective of an anonymous 'explorer' bicycling around the country, frequently carries a tone of arrogance despite Stilgoe's veneer of familiarity, and his failure to supply substance and details for many of his intriguing generalizations proves troublesome.

In his effort to write an accessible plea, the author delivers part jeremiad, part motivational pep talk, and part how-to guide, with occasional brilliant perceptions such as one countering the assumption that Americans are more visually sophisticated today than in previous generations. However, Stilgoe generally fails to elaborate on human causes within an institutional context for the changes he observes. -- Charles K. Piehl, Mankato State University, Minnesota

The New Yorker

Stilgoe writes like someone letting you in on a really cool secret -- several secrets, in fact -- as he teases out the hidden meanings behind often overlooked features of our cities and towns. Along the way, he explains why railroads are coming back, how stores evolve in shopping plazas, and the obscure relationship between the cost of fire insurance and the layout of Main Street. In Stilgoe's world, you don't have to go very far to be an explorer if you pay the right kind of attention.

Kirkus Reviews

An extended exhortation to readers to go outside and explore the natural and constructed environment—from urban fire hydrants to rural fences to highway pit stops—in the American and Emersonian tradition of the exploring eye/I. Stilgoe, the author of previous books on American railroads and landscape, has had the academic's luxury of thinking about things most of us have precious little time to consider: the permanence of the antiquated railroad bed, the hum of alternating current, the uses and meaning of fences.

Evangelically advocating for exploration that can't be accomplished by car, Stilgoe suggests bicycling and walking as ways of getting the news he preaches. The built environment, he lucidly reasons, is 'a sort of palimpsest, a document in which one layer of writing has been scraped off, and another one applied.' The mindful explorer sees what came before, as well as what's there.

The book is partly a lament on the ills of modern society and the passing of Main Street America, with the sweet luxury of its angle parking. He boldly claims, and at least half convinces, when he says that looking outside teaches creativity, problem-solving, a sense of history, pattern, and the magic of understanding. He is predictably arch when it comes to landscape design in public spaces—in particular, the ubiquitous dwarf evergreen species that neatly line our roadside parking lots like housebroken pets (Stilgoe's image), and which he describes as part of the larger marketing strategy behind the development of interstate exchanges. But does Silgoe locate conspiracy where harried planners identified only economy? Stilgoe's is a voice in the wilderness, and this is anesoteric subject at once compelling and important yet, by the standard measuring stick of contemporary culture, sadly insubstantial.