Prairie Time : The Leopold Reserve Revisited Book

Generally speaking, this was a pretty good book, but it has a few pretty significant flaws.

Pros - Good general idea... viewing one specific city, it's civic landmarks, and viewing how they influence the creation of civic culture.
Good use of source materials and pictures.
Covers all kinds of class, racial, gender and ethnic groups.
Well written, overall.

Cons - multi-faceted thesis is a bit cumbersome. She tries to argue a "centralized vs. decentralized" approach, while also weaving in commercialism.
Her introduction about the World's Fair claims that the fair was the origin of modern urban planning and civic culture, but that point is never proven.
There is little continuity between chapters. In one, she talks about race, in another she talks about class, but there is little effort to weave them all together, other than the fact that they are all happening at the same time.
The book ends with the race riot of 1919, but I'm not really sure why. Her arguments about civic culture and urban planning don't really seem to fit in.
As a result, this book ends up reading like a couple of articles sandwiched between two high-intensity, but marginally related bookends.

If she had made stronger introduction and conclusion, and taken more time to weave the different chapters together, her arguments would have been much more convincing.