June Book Club

Well, I actually seem to have read a lot of things this month, even if several of them are my own work that I'm reviewing!

In addition to that, however, I made my way through Annalee Newitz's Four Lost Cities, which I mostly liked a great deal. I did feel as if some of the speculation could have been more clearly marked as speculation--or if it wasn't speculation, than the evidence for it could have been presented. But that's a very small quibble. The overall premise, which is essentially that cities don't get "Lost" except from a romantic, colonialist perspective (sometimes cities get destroyed, or people leave them for various reasons and relocate) is pretty well fleshed out. Is Youngstown, Ohio a "lost city"? Or is it just a city whose main purpose as an industrial center is no longer relevant, so people are moving out to seek lives elsewhere?

(No shade on Youngstown, here, because of course it might undergo a renaissance under the current wave of relocation to smaller urban centers and who the heck knows, don't ask me, I'm just a futurist and I'm not nearly high enough on my own supply to pull off the confidence required for Hot Take Punditry, I'm mostly just thinking of their pretty forthright decision a decade or so back to just bulldoze a bunch of nearly-abandoned neighborhoods they could no longer afford to provide services for.)

The concept of cycles of growth, contraction, and rebirth facilitated by natural disasters and administrative mismanagement seems like something that a lot of people will find soothing to read in the Current Zombie Apocalypse, anyway. Assuming you're one of the people who manages to beat feet out of Pompeii before the pyroclastic flow gets there, anyway.