Book Reviews
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BOOK REVIEWS Edited by John T. Bauer Department of Geography University of Nebraska-Kearney Contents: Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America by JOHN ARCHER, PAUL J. P. SANDUL, and KATHERINE SOLOMONSON, eds. reviewed by Kera Lovell Contested Spaces of Early America by JULIANA BARR and EDWARD COUNTRYMAN, eds. reviewed by Andrew Milson The Curious Map Book by ASHLEY BAYNTON-WILLIAMS reviewed by Steven M. Schnell Leadership in American Academic Geography: The Twentieth Century by MICHAEL S. DEVIVO reviewed by Kari Forbes-Boyte Range Wars: The Environmental Contest for White Sands Missile Range by RYAN H. EDGINGTON reviewed by Jeremy Work Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings by STEFAN EKMAN reviewed by Stentor Danielson The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space by ANDREA E. FROHNE reviewed by Barbara S. Hildebrant Hurricane Katrina in Transatlantic Perspective by ROMAIN HURET and RANDY J. SPARKS, editors reviewed by David Cochran Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773-1859 by INNES M. KEIGHREN, CHARLES W. J. WITHERS, and BILL BELL reviewed by Steven L. Driever Historical Geography Volume 44 (2016): 149-192 © 2016, Historical Geography Specialty Group, American Association of Geographers 150 Reviews Cuisine & Empire: Cooking in World History by RACHEL LAUDEN reviewed by Dawn M. Drake Atlas of the Great Plains by STEPHEN J. LAVIN, FRED M. SHELLEY, and J. CLARK ARCHER reviewed by Russell S. Kirby Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmental- ism by ROBERT D. LIFSET reviewed by Jordan P. Howell Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale by MANUELA MARIANI and PATRICK BARRON, editors reviewed by Catherine Guimond Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction by KATIE MEEHAN and KENDRA STRAUSS, editors reviewed by Austin Kocher Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map by JOSEPH NIGG reviewed by Hannah Gunderman Reclaiming American Cities: The Struggle for People, Place, and Nature since 1900 by RUTHERFORD H. PLATT reviewed by Jeremy Bryson Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands by PETER POPE and SHANNON LEWIS-SIMPSON, editors reviewed by Declan Cullen The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America’s Tourist Paradise, 1896–1968 by CHANELLE N. ROSE reviewed by Matthew R. Cook A Historical Atlas of Tibet by KARL E. RYAVEC reviewed by Ralph Hartsock Coal & Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America by PETER A. SHULMAN reviewed by Andrew T. J. Marshall What is Landscape? by JOHN STILGOE reviewed by Garrett Dash Nelson Reviews 151 Cartography and Capitalism in the Dutch Golden Age by ELIZABETH A. SUTTON reviewed by Sarah Hinman Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain by ERIK SWYNGEDOUW reviewed by Nick Bergmann Violence in Capitalism: Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibility by JAMES A. TYNER reviewed by Kari Forbes-Boyte Stitching the World: Embroidered Maps and Women’s Geographical Education by JUDITH A. TYNER reviewed by Rebecca A. Buller Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America. JOHN ARCHER, PAUL J. P. SANDUL, and KATHERINE SOLOMONSON, editors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp. xxv + 387. 90 b&w photos, 1 table. $35.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8166-9299-6. For nearly a century, suburbia has been characterized as the backbone of white, middle- class America—the new post-World War II “city upon a hill” where both pastoral and moral ideals could be achieved beyond the bounds of urban toil. This representation has begun to shift in recent decades as popular culture hits like Weeds, Breaking Bad, and Fargo dramatize the deviant lifestyles of white suburbanites. New comedies like Blackish and Fresh off the Boat offer an intersectional analysis of the suburbs by capturing how families of color have struggled with and have capitalized on claiming white middle-class privilege on the cul-de-sac. Stories of suburban deviance and conformity alike abound in Making Suburbia, in which editors John Archer, Paul Sandul, and Katherine Solomonson argue that as the suburbs have become increasingly more heterogeneous, the ability to define them as bland, maladaptive, sub-urban, automobile-centric, and homogenous becomes more difficult. Framed by both Henri Lefebvre’s idea of space as socially produced along with Michel de Certeau’s focus on the bricolage of everyday life, this interdisciplinary collection investigates how suburbanites create their own “spatial stories” through quotidian place-making practices and interactions (p. x). Following Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue’s The New Suburban History (2006) in their attention to locality, essays in this volume focus on local instances in which people see and define themselves as suburban within specific conditions and discourses. From garage bands to Asian American shopping malls, the essays illuminate how suburbanites have continually refashioned their communities and identities in often complex and divergent ways since World War II. Chapters are divided into four sections—mobilizing, representing, gathering, and building—that range widely in methodological and conceptual approach. In the book’s most thematically cohesive section, essays in Part 1 examine suburbs as mobilizing forces for political organizing, community building, and self-making. In these essays the design of the suburban home and community become the engine for social and political change. While Becky Nicolaides 152 Reviews and Stacie Taranto evidence how suburban living rooms in tightly-knit neighborhoods became sites of civic engagement for both black and white communities, Trecia Pottinger documents the successes of African American affordable housing organizers who resisted displacement by successfully advocating for a suburban-style condo project with open green spaces. Additionally, both Tim Retzloff and Christopher Sellers offer specific case studies that illuminate how distinct communities of suburbanites rallied together through community associations to defend their access to clean environments and gay socializing spaces. Articles in Part 2 illuminate how suburbanites have utilized discursive techniques to represent themselves and their communities. In “Metaburbia,” Martin Dines argues that the “multiple and sometimes conflicting” depictions of Levittown in Pam Conrad’s Our House and the fictional Heron Bay Estates in John Barth’s The Development evidence suburbia in a state of ongoing change (p. 89). Paul Sandul and Heather Bailey offer different case studies of suburban communities constructing their own cultural memories through civic booster events and historic preservation initiatives. In contrast to these top-down analyses, Ursula Lang’s ethnographic study of yards in Minneapolis evidences the intimate connections between people and their homes, revealing how gardens facilitate not only a profound corporeal experience but remain sites for family and neighborhood bonding. David Smiley’s investigation of shopping center design between the 1930s and 1950s outlines a visual narrative of white middle-class consumption in which the suburban strip mall was imagined as the automobile-friendly alternative to Main Street traffic. In her sweeping survey of “houses of the future,” Holley Wlodarczyk argues that nostalgia for a “mythically simpler past” has continually framed design trends calling for less technologically advanced homes that reflect allegedly more “natural” lifestyles (p. 166). In Part 3, authors demonstrate how local actors harness the suburban built environment as a tool to articulate shared community identities along lines of race, ethnicity, age, and religion. Willow Lung-Amam challenges the idea of the lily white suburbs by evidencing how recent patterns of immigration have made Asian Americans the most suburban ethnic group in the United States. Although suburban shopping malls have been derided for their focus on inauthentic consumerism, her investigation of Fremont, California’s Asian shopping centers illuminates these spaces as significant sites of community building where Asian Americans of all ages make local and transnational connections. However, Jodi Rios’s essay reaffirms the need for scholars to study the privileges of white suburban citizenship. Using the all-black Normandy, Missouri school district as her focus, Rios asks important questions about how space is racialized in ways that continue to reinforce urban inequality in the twenty-first century. Finally, Gretchen Buggeln and Charity Carney both examine different ways that churches are designed—through “youth rooms” that capitalize on teenage desires to rebel as well as stadium-sized megachurches—to materially and architecturally defend the image and identity of prosperity. Essays in Part 4 evidence how homes have been spaces within which families assimilate to or differentiate from the suburban mainstream. Andrew Friedman offers an innovative analysis of how Cold War spies and double agents utilized suburban clichés while working undercover in Arlington’s suburbs near the Pentagon. Anna Andrzejewski traces the tactics of architect Marshall Erdman in marketing prefabricated homes to doctors in postwar Madison, Wisconsin. Both Dianne Harris and Steve Waksman analyze how different rooms in the postwar ranch house became new sites for music making and listening for white families. From listening parties in