As a doctoral student in Yale's American Studies program, Drew writes from the perspective not of an architect or urban planner but of a passionate advocate of old-fashioned cities. Rather than concentrating on theories or even solutions, she records what it feels like to travel through the bland malls, freeways, and office parks of edge city. And it feels bad. True, her urban prejudices are often on bold display, as in a vituperative passage about the South and its longstanding state of "social irresponsibility and denial" or in her assertion that "the huge numbers of Americans between the coasts ... live in a world that is deeply provincial and culturally starved." But no one could accuse Drew of dispassion. It's impossible to read this book without feeling that our desecration of the American landscape has impoverished our inner landscapes as well. --Mary Park