Although this book is 25 years old, the ideas in it seem as fresh and relevant as they must have at the time it was written -- in the days before Facebook, Google, Uber, self-driving cars, and volatile weather patterns. Even though it seems that cities are having a major comeback, this book brings a huge warning that our cities are manicured and monitored in ways that should make us shudder, if we think about it. They're not the cities of 50 years ago, and we should be ashamed that our fears and simple-mindedness have let this happen.The essays tackle a wide range of built spaces, but always circle back to a central idea that public spaces are being eliminated in favor of commercialized spaces that limit freedom and creativity in the service of safety, comfort, entertainment and money. So we tour gigantic shopping malls that have become de-facto town centers, but with guards able to kick out anyone who looks or acts different, or who is just lingering. We have skywalks in cities such as Toronto and Minneapolis that have killed the street life below, while being dead zones on their own. We have Orange County, California, with its gated communities, highly designed plazas, and more Olympic training swimming pools than libraries.Over and over, the authors of these essays explain how the spaces have dulled our senses and tricked us into believing that the fascimilies we are being served are the real things. This is especially so at the reconstructions of historic seaports in Manhattan (South Street), Boston (Faneuil Hall), Baltimore and elsewhere. A few ersatz images are stuck on storefronts, like lettering in a 19th century style, and we are tricked into buying lobster pots that have never been in the water.Atop the heap, of course, is Disneyworld, which is referenced numerous times and is the subject of the culminating chapter. It has so totally subverted reality that it gives us a fake version of reality so denuded that we have lost all connection with the past. The phrase in the book is something like that for decades we strived to develop production so that we had time for entertainment, and now that we have entertainment our subject is often production. In other words, we don't do real work, but when we go to Disneyworld, we can see images of people doing old-style work, like washing clothes by hand. So does Williamsburg, by the way. And without the dirt or mud or slavery (though they've actually improved the coverage of slavery in the quarter-century since the book was written).Here's another great point, just to give you a sample of the depth of thinking in this book. There's a long section on gentrification, and how when it was occurring in the late 1980s in the Alphabet City part of New York City, the people doing the gentrification referred to themselves as pioneers. They were winning the West all over again. It was as much a fable as the first winning of the West. So that's one observation. Then, the author doubles down with a hilarious passage from an ad about cowboy fashions that were all the rage in NYC at the time, thus furthering this myth that the city was The Wild West that needed to be tamed -- as if tens of thousands of people weren't living in these impoverished areas and minding their own business. And then the author triples that with comments on Ralph Lauren designs at the time, which were heavy on African prints (think: savages), though Lauren had never been to Africa and famously said, "sometimes it's better if you haven't been there."The other point that the book makes very well is that these images of our past are now jumbled together so rapidly and randomly that we've lost all context. This is done in commercial properties or downtowns or Las Vegas, where architectural styles are thrown together. A long section about Los Angeles describes subversions as a library that looks like a prison and a prison that is regularly mistaken by visitors for being a luxury hotel. One of the authors notes that this rapid-fire composition is like TV, which throws images at you one after another that are not connected in real life, either geographically or chronologically -- maybe the Vietnam War, a basketball player, a sunset and New York City's skyline. Of course, this has only become much worse in our Internet era.One final thing to note: this is not an easy book. The language is dense and purposefully complex. Words are made up sometimes, as professors do, by adding "izification" to nouns, and other such rhetorical devices. But don't get too intimidated, because there are careful observations throughout the book. And every few pages a fascinating observation shines through.