By Johan Neeskens

James Howard Kunstler has a new book out that deserves to be called The Dieter’s Guide to Weight Loss During Sex in an Outdoor Room. I mean this in the best possible way: Every citizen interested in the possibility of exciting street life should read it.

If Kunstler’s publisher would only follow my unsolicited advice, Kunstler would have a much bigger audience. The first two elements of my proposed title (dieting and sex) would attract every sentient American over the age of 12. The last element (Outdoor Room) draws those interested in design and adds an air of mystery and sophistication for the layperson.

A cheap attempt to sell more books? Sure, but knowingly ironic in the sense of The Dieter’s Guide to Weight Loss During Sex, which parodied —and profited from interest in — paperback bestsellers. What title better to alert Oprah Winfrey? It gets Kunstler’s book on her show, and it is an unstoppable revolution from there.

What revolution? The New Urbanism, of course. But you can’t have a revolution if people can’t get the message. (One need only recall Lewis Mumford, who for 50 distinguished years was to urbanism what cod liver oil was to children.)

And that is the curse: Design books fall mostly into two categories: Seductive photographic essays printed on rich coated stock, destined for coffee tables and never read (I once saw a coffee table consisting of a sheet of glass supported by two stacks of such archi-porn. Each “leg” must have cost $1000); and those meant to impress university tenure committees — unreadable deconstructions of Vienna’s Ringstrasse with titles like Deconstructing Vienna’s Ringstrasse.

Thus, Kunstler’s book, meant to be read, baffled the book packagers, getting the awful Home From Nowhere as a title and an unintentionally ironic cover. The title refers to Kunstler’s first book, Geography of Nowhere, which promised some heaviness (Geography of), leavened by gonzo reportage (Nowhere).

But Home from Nowhere, while a much more challenging, provocative, and therefore better book, is resonant only with groupies of the first book. Kunstler has been ghettoized.

Kunstler’s light, and that of others like him, starts out under a basket of a publisher’s making. The public, not to mention the author, is poorer off when the message,for example, that Buffalo’s zoning code can act as an oppressive instrument, does not become part of local political discourse. Inaccessible, the message gets swamped by the quotidian concerns of poverty, ignorance, and sloth, not to mention the content of local cable TV.

That is a shame, for Home From Nowhere offers large territories of provocative thought written in the fast-paced 10,000-word nuggets of magazine journalism. It instructs in a diverting way, which is the point of the craft: Tell a good story about a story worth telling. Home form Nowhere is in fact a tale of life on the urban edge in millennial America, a Boys on the Bus of the neo-urban roadshow.

For example, to illustrate the strains put upon common sense planning, Kunstler offers this comment as a town commissioner and local college boardmember decides to vote, after all, to allow a sleazy development that would house the college: “Well, anything could happen. Winged monkeys could fly out of his butt before the night was over. Who can ever say what the future holds…?”
So that readers can vet his views, Kunstler sprinkles the text with his personal experiences and a short chapter on his ethos. That self awareness and public confessional could get him a sequel: In the Drafting Room With Oprah.