The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing by Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. “Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues. The final section, “A Commonplace Book of Home,” collects quotes ranging from Eudora Welty and Clarence Darrow to Anton Chekhov and Chief Seattle to demonstrate that Pierson is not alone in her concern.Ī keen eye and wry sense of humor are almost enough to brighten this bleak memoir-cum-plaint. Pierson does not suggest solutions to the problems of population growth, suburban sprawl and gentrification her book offers instead reminiscence, lamentation and an insistence that we recognize what we are losing when we lose it. Although the little Catskill communities that were submerged to create the Ashokan Reservoir were not part of her personal landscape, she regrets their demise and that of other rural areas that have succumbed over the years to the need for water. But the author’s particular bitterness is reserved for New York State’s destruction of small communities to create New York City’s water supply.

A victim of developers’ zeal, Hoboken is now “Luxuryland, a subsidiary of Disney,” its condominiums filled with stockbrokers, its hippie bars replaced by martini bars. The author remembers it as an area with character, collecting Manhattan’s overflow of hopeful and creative young people. Neither is rundown 1980s Hoboken, where she lived while in her 20s. The Akron, Ohio, of Pierson’s childhood, the details of which are still vivid in her mind, is no longer there. The author is deeply disturbed by what “progress” is doing to the landscape of America. A meditation on loss by Pierson ( The Perfect Vehicle, 1997, etc.), who mourns the changes that have forever altered both her hometown and the city she came to adopt as home.

The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing by Melissa Holbrook Pierson