In a sense, this is a bit of an odd book for me to read. I've never been to Pittsburgh, and to be perfectly honest I had to look it up on a map before I started reading because I only had a very vague idea of where it was in America. But I'm reading my way through a list of books on urban nature, and if this one doesn't quite fit in with the rest it's relatively short and I thought I'd give it a go, because I know even less about landscape architecture than I do about the geography of Pittsburgh, and so I thought it might be interesting.

It was, though in places very dry. Basically, way back in the day, the point at Pittsburgh, at an effective junction of three rivers, helped to shape the history of the United States, being an important battleground between British, French, and Native American peoples. Some generations later it was a dump. Not an actual rubbish dump, but an ill-managed, ill-planned, rundown urban slum of a place that certainly made little advantage of its beautiful watery location. Hence the continual plans to tear down the lot and put a park there. I say "continual" because the bickering over what to put there lasted literal generations, and the building of the park itself took close to thirty years. Hence this historical overview, and Alberts makes plain the many, many challenges the multiple stakeholders had in developing the area into something attractive.

As I said, however, it can be quite dry, with a cast of dozens to keep track of, and it's not helped by the lack of pictures. There are admittedly a number of them, but a surprising proportion of the pictures here were of people involved in the park renewal project - groups of them standing around solemnly looking at plans, that sort of thing. I realise that Alberts wanted to give credit (and well-deserved credit) to the people involved, but it would have been much more helpful to embed visual images of the actual park development more effectively within the text. Let me give an example. Thanks to two elderly bridges of surpassing ugliness and endless traffic problems, two new bridges had to be built further back along the shoreline and a traffic interchange designed to link them up. Alberts describes plans A, B, C, E, and X for this interchange (I am not kidding) but I honestly couldn't figure out the difference between them, or even begin to visualise them, and the final result only became clear several chapters later, when photos of the construction of said interchange were inserted, for reasons past understanding, into the chapter on archaeological research within the park.

So, interesting, but more useful as a historical rather than popular record, I think.

Allende's prose is really beautiful. It was so easy to sink into this, because the writing is so elegant, and it makes me want to pay closer attention to my own (knowing as I do that it will suffer by comparison).

That being said, I know I've shelved this under "writing" but it isn't really a book about writing... except it sort of is, and there was one passage that clinched it for me. "I have asked myself a thousand times what would have happened had I stayed [...] No one can answer that question, but of one thing I am sure: I would not be a writer had I not experienced that exile" (164). Allende is referring to when she fled Chile following Pinochet's military coup. That exile is the key point. The entire book is really a discussion of identity, and of exile, and the way that Allende used memories of Chile to cope with what is essentially bone-deep homesickness. And this pervading sense of nostalgia, over time, builds up to what she calls "an invented country," where the actuality of the country she left is altered by the perceptions of individual memory. That invented country came to the fore, of course, in books like The House of the Spirits, and so it's arguable (as indeed Allende herself seems to argue) that this fundamental sense of exile is the experience that underpins her entire development as a writer. It's just all very, very interesting... and there's still that gorgeous prose.

Believe it or not this was actually fascinating, which was not what I expected from a history of trash removal. The title, I do admit, is something of a misnomer - it's particularly about garbage in American cities for one, rather than cities in general, and although the book purports to cover the period from 1880-1980, the vast, vast majority of it analyses the period of 1880-1920. The rest of the decades get a bare look-in. Even so, fascinating. And well-written. I have been on a run lately of horrible academic writing, which causes me to glaze over in the space of mere paragraphs, but there's actually life to this prose, and the subject is all the more interesting for it.

Interesting, too, is the split focus. I've shelved the book as politics, because essentially that's what it is: how city governments manage garbage, and the multiple constituents they have to juggle to do so, primarily because this is a topic that can be approached from multiple angles. Clearly there is the issue of public health, but there's also engineering problems (how should garbage be disposed of?), economic problems (does the city pay for garbage collection and disposal, or does it contract out?), the need to encourage public engagement with keeping their cities clean, starting in the school system and keeping the adults educated on the subject as well. The size of the cities affects decision making, as does their location. The solutions tried are not always successful. Sometimes they appear successful and later turn out to be disasters, as the early reliance on incineration took place in a time when air pollution was not fully understood, for example. There is, in some times and places, a touching if naive reliance on the free market. All in all, though, it's a readable and comprehensive study, that got me thinking about a topic I've barely ever given two seconds of consideration to. I'm glad I read it.

Two and a half stars, rounding up to three. Rarely have I ever wished Goodreads could let us give half stars more, because the rounding up (and for consistency's sake, I always round up) makes it appear better than it is. In fact, this novel is very much split for me. On the bright side, it has the Nightsisters, a group of Force-wielding witches who live in a matriarchy on a distant planet, and they are unreservedly enjoyable. I like everything about them. Unfortunately, this often disturbing population and their internal machinations are periodically interrupted by an extremely off-putting romance. Leia has a marriage proposal from the heir of an extremely wealthy empire, and accepting such would allow her to establish a new Alderaan, where the refugees of her home planet could settle and rebuild. Said heir is also attractive, but that's neither here nor there.

The bargain to rebuild Alderaanian society on a new planet should have been the central focus of the romance storyline here. Despite Luke's ridiculous assertion that all women dream of being swept off their feet by a literal prince (which, have you even met your sister, Luke?) Leia is - and always has been - primarily a political figure whose central ethos is how best to serve her people. Instead this is glossed over in service of a very silly love triangle between her, Han, and Prince Isolder... a triangle which largely consists of the two men trying to one-up each other with no regard at all to what Leia wants. At one point Han even puts her under mind control to get her to go with him, and I nearly shut the entire book in disgust. There is only so far the witches of Dathomir can redeem such tripe.

Also, I do not much care for the fact that Dathomir was being bought and sold - again, by Han (among others) - with no consideration for the consent, or even the knowledge, of the inhabitants. I realise this was written back in the 90s, but I would hope any Star Wars author writing today would be less glib, and more critical, about this practice, which was not even remotely interrogated by Wolverton within the text. No, I'm changing my mind. Down to two stars you go.

A basic field guide for young children, introducing them to the most common plants and animals of the cities in which they live (in the case of this particular guidebook, the cities of Britain). The illustrations are clear and uncluttered, but the descriptions tend towards the absolutely minimal. The Grey Squirrel, for instance, has the following entry: "Squirrels are common in parks and gardens and can become very bold and tame. Their coats may have brown patches. Body length 27cm" (p. 38). The other entries are of similar length and detail, but then this is likely a result of the target audience - again, it's clearly for younger children, and if it gets them interested in the wildlife around them, more advanced guides can be sought.

Close to 50 years ago now, the New Zealand historian Michael King went on a trip with a photographer to document the last few Māori women - all of whom were elderly - who had the moko, a traditional tattoo on the chin and lips. That part of Māori culture was sinking fast (I'm happy to say that it seems to be making a resurgence) and so this book, which has been in print in New Zealand ever since, was a sort of last gasp attempt to document what was then a dying art. There are a few short chapters on the history, design, and application of moko, and honestly I would have liked there to have been more of this. For the most part, however, the book consists of photographs, mostly close-ups of these women's faces. The photographs themselves are striking. They're not studio portraits or anything like that. Marti Friedlander, the photographer, took the photos in the women's homes, and with only the available light at that home, so there's nothing staged about any of them. Kids, cats, whoever was there at the time, they're all included.

It's a sensitive, fascinating artistic and cultural record.

I've shelved this under fantasy, but it's only marginally fantasy really, and could almost be interpreted in the way that The Haunting of Hill House is interpreted... with all the non-natural elements resulting from the protagonist's instability and trauma. That trauma, here, is very clearly apparent. Sam and her older sister Caitlin have been removed from an abusive home and sent to live with their aunt. Caitlin is very clear-sighted about their situation, but Sam is miserable and just wants to go home, even though home is awful. Both girls are reacting to their new home as if it is another abusive environment - hyper-aware of their aunt's emotions and her ability to hurt them, and trying their best to mitigate it - even though that new home is a place of safety and understanding and their aunt loves them dearly. It's just very well done, with an enormous amount of restraint and even subtlety, and it wasn't surprising to read the author's note at the back which indicates that they have drawn on sad experience in writing this.

The fantastical elements, real or not, come in the form of the children's game of the title, and Sam slowly comes to realise that the characters in that game act as metaphors for her own family relationships. By playing the game, and interacting with those characters, she is able to grope her way to a healthier understanding of what has happened to her, and how little she is to blame. It's so cleverly and gently done, and even though I own an ecopy, I'm going to have to find a hard copy, I think, because it's lovely and I really want to read it again in a more tangible form.

Not really for me, I think. It's not the writing that's at fault, really, the stories collected here are short and punchy, and the prose has a real sense of voice to it. I read the book in a single sitting because of these factors - admittedly, it's a rather short book, but still. It's technically competent, and I'm not giving it two stars because I feel that it's badly written, because I don't think that it is. It just isn't to my taste. I love horror, but I admit that I gravitate to some parts of it more than others. The stories collected here have a strong focus on physical and family violence, particularly (but not exclusively) violence against women. And, you know, that's a big part of the horror genre, it really is... but I don't much enjoy it. I don't think it's a real coincidence that the story I liked best here, "Moan," is a story about a haunted house - and it's a good story! But it's not a story about a serial killer slicing women into ribbons, or the first-person account of a rapist as he strips his victim, or the recollections of a father who has beaten his wife and young daughter to death. You get the point. If that's the kind of horror you like then you'll probably like this. It's just not for me.

I read this as part of the 2021 Read Harder Challenge, for task 4: read an LGBTQ+ history book. I picked it because while I had heard of Stonewall, I knew vanishingly little about it... and after reading this very interesting and well-researched book, I have to say, in all honesty, that I still don't know that much about it.

Duberman, in all fairness, has written a very readable account, and he's used a compelling narrative structure, focusing on the experiences of six people and interweaving their experiences throughout the book. I always respond better, in literature, to character over plot, if you'll excuse the phrasing, so this really made the book seem more accessible, especially as in some places I got a little lost in the welter of organisations involved. I think the real eye-opener for me here was just how fractured the LGBTQ+ activist community was during the 1960s, and how much of that scattering was due to an insufficient acknowledgement of what today would be called intersectionality. Different activist groups had different priorities that were affected by the gender and race of their members, but by having six diverse voices at the centre of the book Duberman is able to give a much more effective context to the events surrounding Stonewall.

That, essentially, is what this book is: context. We don't actually get to Stonewall until about two-thirds of the way in, and the riots themselves are dispensed with in about 25 pages. Everything else is context, and as such it seems to me (with my very limited knowledge) to be more a history of American LGBTQ+ organisations in the 1960s than it is a close focus on the riots, which is what I was expecting when I picked it up. Admittedly, after reading I'm not sure that you can do justice to one without the other...