By Eli Ginzberg.
Harvard. 301 pp. $27.50
Something new is appearing on the American landscape. Architects, planners, and others have given it a variety of names-spread city, slurb, exurb, edge city, sprawl. The profusion of vaguely ominous names is only one sign of our deep uncertainty about what this new thing is. Is it merely the old suburb swollen beyond all proportion? Or are we seeing the distinction between city and suburb gradually being erased? Historian Robert Fishman believes that a "new city," utterly without precedent,...
Historian Robert Fishman believes that a "new city," utterly without precedent, is arising. If its opportunities are recognized, he argues, Americans' long quest to combine the amenities of technological civilization with the pleasures of natural surroundings may at last be
rewarded. If they are not, the failure will blight the landscape of America--and the lives of Americans--for generations to come.
it. His ideal was the medieval city, which he argued had been unjustly ma- ligned.
Our images of plague-ridden city dwellers clad in filthy rags come from a later era, Mum- ford argued. He insisted that life in the medi- eval city was generally healthy and fulfilling, rich in architectural beauty and civic life. Most important to him was the openness to nature that the cities' "clustered" housing made possi- ble. "Gardens and orchards, sometimes fields and pastures, existed within...
y fire or by ice? wondered Robert Frost. With a bang or with a whimper? wondered T.
S. Eliot. In the chronicles of our mortal race there may have been one or two people,
for example William ("I decline to accept the end of man") Faulkner, who did not concede that a bold Finis would one day be scrawled at the conclusion of the human saga. There may have been one or two who would not have been tempted-were only it possible!-to skip ahead to the final chap- ters of our story and discover ho...
The Greeks named Europe for the princess Europa, who, according to myth, so charmed Zeus that he transformed himself into a bull and carried her off from the Middle East to Crete. Zeus promised her that their sons would rule "over all men on earth." Europe has often seemed, in another sense of the word, no more than a myth.
Steven Lagerfeld describes the journey to European Unity; Josef Joffe points to
the formidable obstacles that remain.
Three years from now, on January 1, 1993, Western
Europe will be "born
again." The 12-state Euro-
pean Community (EC) will
turn into the Single Inte- grated Market (SIM). This new creation will unite some 320 million people with a com- bined gross domestic product of about five trillion dollars and will stretch from Cork to Calabria, from the Atlantic to the Ae- gean. As a trading bloc, it will surpass all others in the world. Even today, the (exter- nal) exports of the EC dwarf...
Frank D. McConnell
Apopular joke defines com- professionals-is at the center of a vitu- edy as the second oldest perative debate that has been raging on profession, which, like the American and British campuses for at least first, has been ruined am- a decade. ateurs. The debate may sound like an esoteric I would suggest that the academic squabble. But it has serious im- truly oldest profession is poetry-or plications for the future of humanistic storytelling, or mythmaking, or whatever studies...
For all the academic ink de- voted to the subject of revolu- tion, history is rarely discon- tinuous, rarely an affair of dramatic leaps or breaks. While rhetoric and the emo-tional environment can shift quickly, the actual workings of a society usually change at about the same rate as the pro- verbial freight train. Just the same, there are occasional turning points in any na- tion's life, when the engine crests a hill or enters a deep curve. The train remains a' train-momentum intact-but thanks...