Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape

by Grady Clay

In Real Places , Grady Clay presents the American landscape in a completely fresh and untypical way. Rather than look at locations, he studies constructed, imaginative sites. Clay explores the fascination of "Fall Color Country," or "Lover's Lane." What draws people to these "generic" landscapes and keeps them coming back literally and figuratively time and time again? Real Places catalogs and describes a unique cross-section of America, emphasizing the beauty and intrigue of these hidden gems. Heavily illustrated with maps and photographs depicting the everyday as well as the bizarre, Clay's entertaining Baedeker allows us to see in a new way what has always been "right before our eyes."

"This book provides a language for the architecture of everyday life."—Ross Miller, Chicago Tribune

"Spirited observations and capsule histories."—Suzanne Stephens, New York Times Book Review

"Compelling. . . . Included here are many nuggets of insight and illumination."—Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor

"An amusing and touching book about the reality we Americans have captured in our language."— Boston Sunday Globe

322 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 1994

Reviews

[Howard Mansfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read Real Places alongside a Field Guide to Sprawl and you will get a view of a country rapidly remaking itself with cell towers, parking lots, malls, condos, and prisons -- rapidly remaking itself with a myriad of landscapes we haven’t yet named. What Grady Clay shows us in Real Places is just how many zones of use and abandonment we have, how many different ways we have to settle and sell, mine and move. These two books --Real Places and A Field Guide to Sprawl -- give a name to the places we pass, but don’t yet understand.

[Deidre · Rating 3 out of 5]

This looked very cool...but I was a bit disappointed and ended up just skimming it.