NONFICTION

What Goes Up: The Right and Wrongs to the City

by Michael Sorkin
Verso. Apr. 2018. 368p. ISBN 9781786635150. $34.95. ARCH
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This is the fourth volume of designer and professor (architecture and urban design, CUNY) Sorkin's Baudelairean "Greenwich Village" observations of New York City over the past 30 years, and he works to prove the global submission to authority inside inequality, as more and more wealth attracts less and less wisdom. Certainly, the development of New York City over the past half century has proven this, and the author has been draining this swamp for three decades. Real research and drama, perhaps produced by the author's graduate students, are needed to enrich and enlighten the diletantish reportage of this volume to make it comprehensible to the general public.
VERDICT Unfortunately, this book is excessively Talmudic in its perception/reception/connection/conception/inception of modern urban design of the 1960s. It's hard to imagine who will read this work and who will understand it because it has no illustrations, no citations, and no footnotes, and many of its words are obscurantic to the point of "Googlicity."
Reviewed by Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr. , Mar 16, 2018
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