The book has virtues: the theming is strong; the concepts are so very interesting. To me, though, the contract needed to be proofread a few more times before it was executed. I do not blame the writing because there are chapters that flow smoothly, chapters that felt ironed out, even slick. For the most part, though the small errors in formatting and the larger choices of structure in each individual sentence made the book feel unpleasant to actually read.
Read MoreBut let this be a reminder to myself and to you that expectations are poison for reality. The book was really good, as a whole, up until the chapter about computers, which disappointed me greatly. There is a chance it was a personal issue and not the book—I’ll admit that sometimes things just don’t stick—but even after reading and re-reading, the explanations and stories about computing felt tenuous and vague. Everything was extremely unlike the detailed and highly comprehensible chapters on, say, the typewriter, or the telegraph. If you’ve ever played a long video game and the final dungeon feels like the developers ran out of time and just plopped a bunch of enemies in a bland maze, well, this had the same vibe. It’s there because it is supposed to be there.
Read MoreMentally comparing NYU’s campus integration, where my office is currently embedded, to Columbia’s walled fortress, where I worked for a year, solidifies the vivid picture Death and Life paints during some of its pontifications:
“Big universities in cities, so far as I can see, have given no thought or imagination to the unique establishments they are. Typically they either pretend to be cloistered or countrified places, nostalgically denying their transplantation, or else they pretend to be office buildings. (Of course they are neither.)”
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