What I’ve been reading

1. Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier.  There are a variety of books on these figures and this topic, but after buying and perusing a whole bunch of them, this is the one I found useful.

2. Meryle Secrest, Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject.  A highly entertaining quasi-autobiography, focusing on her work on the nine different biographies she wrote of some very different people.  As far as I can tell, Secrest is 95 years old and living in the Washington, D.C. area — hope I run into her at Mama Chang some day.  Though I suspect she lives in Bethesda.

3. Paul McCartney, Wings: A Story of a Band on the Run.  Not really written by McCartney, but excerpts from interviews with parties involved with Wings, Paul included.  Presented as if it were an oral history, which in part it is.  Very well done, not for everyone obviously but it is for me.  Macca and music aside, it is a good study of how to reinvent oneself, and how weird you need to be to actually succeed with that.  Here is a good Ian Leslie review.

4. Eça de Queiros, Adam and Eve in Paradise.  Originally from the 19th century, but translated into English only this year.  A 60 pp. novella about exactly what the title indicates, noting that matters are not as simple as the first telling of that story might have suggested.

5. Daniel Baldwin Hess, editor, The Shoup Doctrine: Essays Celebrating Donald Shoup and Parking Reforms, is much needed and is exactly as it seeks to present itself.