Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric KlinenbergMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I was most interested in this book as I understood from cursory jacket blurb glimpsing that it focused on local public libraries. It did in early chapters, but the author also took chapters to discuss the public good related to public buildings of all kinds, including sports arenas, government office buildings, park buildings and the like. He even extended his targets, digressing into pubs and office building lobbies as “palaces for the people”. About half way through the book, the author turned it into a book about climate change, and spent much of the second half of the book describing how social infrastructure can help in times of disaster and in bringing people together to solve problems. By the end of the book, I felt the climate change “storyline” had been overdone. Overall, I enjoyed the various anecdotes of what ended up being a light read, but I didn’t add much to what I expected.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment