Arkansas City, Kansas (Images of America Series) Book

Looking for an uncritical celebration of urban renewal? Here it is! The author seems to blindly accept the University's claims that buildings it wants to get rid of are "blighted," or that poor people are being kicked out of Hyde Park to decrease crime, or that breaking up a single-family house into multiple units is per se bad.

Okay, I got the book for the pictures. But even the pictures disappoint. They're black and white and details are often hard to discern. And seeing old house after old house, with few notes on architecture, quickly gets boring. The book would have been better to include some of the details that truly give neighborhoods their character, like murals, signs, monuments, businesses, or anything that shows how the land is used, a la Camilo Jose Vergara. And there is very little about the present-day structure of Hyde Park. Not worth reading.