John

This could have been a five-star book if there had been an editor who could have stood up to the author and fought for the reader’s interest in the same way the author fights for the interests of people against the ignorance and arrogance of the traffic engineering profession. It’s a hugely important topic, deeply informed and passionate author with important insights to share. The problem is, the book reads as if it’s 88 blog posts glued together almost verbatim, and the deep work of actually building all that material into a coherent work rather than just a compilation of separate works was simply skipped.

The author is probably a terrific classroom teacher, but the jokey asides that work so well in person just come off as snarky half the time in print. Further, about half the footnotes are worthwhile, but half are just japes … again, probably workable and useful in the classroom or on a video to help people keep paying attention, but they are just distracting and annoying in the text. Worse, the microscopic mice type font used for footnotes and endnotes make it impossible to actually go from the text to the footnotes readily.

This would have been a much better book if the author had been forced to condense it into several long-read magazine articles, and given some help from the graphics department to put some good graphics in, especially a timeline or two that could have served to SHOW the reader how the more traffic engineering we got, the worse our safety got. Instead, he spends pages and pages trying to use text to explain something that is easily grasped if shown graphically. The best part of the book is the final two sections, which would have better been placed at the beginning to motivate the rest of the work.

I would love to read a second edition of this book if he takes his own (repeated over and over again) advice to others to actually TEST the product in the real world rather than just assuming that because he’s credentialed, what he produces is the best way to produce it. Just as his peers in traffic engineering need to start designing for safety of people using the product, the author needs to rework the book with the reader at the center.

I would give this more stars if I could. Nearly a perfect book — a gripping story followed by a thoughtful context analyzing the forces at work and a preview of coming ‘attractions’ set to bedevil us if we do not awaken from our trance of thinking that somehow this will all work out. Very hard to put down, and impossible to forget. I am pretty sure this will be among my top five books of the 21st C for a long long time to come.

Some tremendous sections in here. A chilling read in November 2023, 85 years after Kristallnacht, when a small group of Nazis marched down State St in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday. The back third of the book trying to suss out the “German” character doesn’t hold up well at all, but the first 15 chapters are full of insights and recognizable people who fill the MAGA movement here.

Powerful powerful book. Hard to put down, and I think of it often.

Well written and keeps the reader engaged; could have lost some of the dad jokes but overall quite good, especially in an illuminating theme that carries throughout the book in terms of placing cemeteries as the places that became models for much of what America became, especially the grass-lawn suburbia of the post-war era.