Surroundings Will Look Different After Reading ‘Outside Lies Magic’
“Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places” By John R. Stilgoe ($21, Walker and Company, 187 pages)
Buying a book is a risk. Obviously you haven’t read it, nor most likely has anyone you know. And unless it’s a best-seller and critics have reviewed it in magazines and newspapers, it’s tough to know very much at all about the book. So you read the a few paragraphs posted on Amazon.com, or the glowing prose on the inside of the jacket cover and plunk down your money.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you do both in this transaction.
That’s pretty much how reading “Outside Lies Magic” went.
A few paragraphs about the book in a magazine piqued my interest enough to look further. This book, it seemed, might offer insights into new ways of looking at our everyday environment.
The author encouraged daily strolls along neighborhood streets or into the countryside bordering your town while looking for clues as to the early history of your community.
Perhaps the book will end up too esoteric, I thought, but I’m willing to spend an evening or two reading about someone else’s navel-gazing if I can mine some thought gems along the way. The author’s credentials pushed through the decision for me - John Stilgoe is a professor of landscape history at Harvard University and author of four other books about America’s landscapes.
“Outside Lies Magic” turned out to be the mother lode of interesting facts and perspectives about urban landscapes. Chapters ranged from the history of strip malls to the effects of renovating main street to a discussion of backyard fences and what they do to neighborly conversation. The chapters about the effects of running power lines through neighborhoods and the motivation for building the interstate freeway system were downright riveting.
“… studies of atom bomb damage in Japanese cities demonstrated that the new highway could withstand even nuclear hits and that whatever damage might be done by A-bombs, even H-bombs, the Army Corps of Engineers could put right in a day or two, radiation excepted,” Stilgoe writes. “Moreover, the five-mile-long straight stretches of highway across the High Plains made perfect secondary landing strips for B-52 bombers.”
“Few motorists nowadays realize the relationship between aircraft design and highway design.”
Stilgoe traces the decimation of urban street trees to the electrification of turn-of-thecentury cities and mourns the loss of house-to-house mail delivery as a community-building service.
“Outside Lies Magic” has very little to do with magic or appreciation of nature and everything to do with the man-made environment and how that has shaped the way we live much more than any natural occurrence. After reading this book, you will never again step outside the house and look at your yard, your street or your community in the same way.