This issue was produced over the holiday season of 2015, a time for family, friends, and celebration as well as a time of thanks. This season reminds me of the need to thank the excellent volunteer reviewers for their service in producing reviews for JAPA. While it is often a pleasure to write a review, the job of a reviewer is sometimes thankless, as you've got a pushy review editor asking, "Where's the review?" and the book you have chosen to review may not be the masterpiece you had hoped it would be. A huge thank you to our excellent reviewers for their time, energy, and expertise, and for always offering an honest take on the books they are evaluating.
This issue's review section starts with a double book review from JAPA's most reliable and outstanding reviewer, Michael B. Teitz of the University of California, Berkeley. Teitz is a retired faculty member, yet probably busier and more productive in his retirement than I have been at any point in my career. He regularly emails me about a new book he is reading, to suggest a book to assign out for review, or—my personal favorite—to volunteer to write a review. This time Teitz tackles two very different books on the topic of bridges. The first, Bridges: Their Engineering and Planning, coauthored by George C. Lee and Ernest Sternberg, is a description of the planning and engineering process for bridges, which are one of our most long-lived infrastructure elements. Teitz finds much to admire in the book. He then turns his attention to Karen Trapenberg Frick's Remaking the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge: A Case of Shadowboxing With Nature, a study of a many-billion-dollar megaproject in the Bay Area. Teitz describes a successful case study that is fraught with politics, rising costs, unforeseen challenges, and an unhappy outcome for most despite the long planning, design, and construction time involved.
The following section looks at two very different books on housing. Florida State University (FSU) faculty member April Jackson reviews Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy, edited by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence J. Vale. Jackson reports that the editors have done much to address and dispel many of the myths surrounding public housing. Housing professionals will enjoy how well the book tackles these prevailing and damaging myths and provides ammunition for responding to skeptics and challengers to public housing investments. Carlos Teixeira and Wei Li's edited volume The Housing and Economic Experiences of Immigrants in U.S. and Canadian Cities is reviewed next by University of Florida PhD student Se Yeon Hwang. Hwang reports that this volume tackles a topic largely overlooked by planners: the experiences of immigrants to the United States and Canada in obtaining housing and building successful lives in a new country. While something of a niche topic, Hwang finds that the book offers useful insights into the role of policy and neighborhoods in easing the transition of immigrant families.
The next two books in this issue's review section revolve around the broad theme of resilience. Robert Jones of the Florida Conflict Resolution Consortium reviews the second edition of Suzanne W. Morse's Smart Communities: How Citizens and Local Leaders Can Use Strategic Thinking to Build a Brighter Future. This book focuses on how the role of building a strong economy through engagement and consensus building can help communities move past the stage of problem identification into action and implementation. Jones applauds Morse Moomaw for establishing the importance of the economy in city-building efforts, but also in recognizing the importance of collaborative planning in promoting long-term economic resilience. FSU faculty member Tisha Holmes, another colleague of mine, tackles a book on a much more traditional form of community resilience: disaster preparedness in coastal communities. Planning for Community Resilience: A Handbook for Reducing Vulnerability to Disasters, written by the excellent, mostly Texas A&M–based team of Jamie Hicks Masterson, Walter Gillis Peacock, Shannon S. Van Zandt, Himanshu Grover, Lori Feild Schwarz, and John T. Cooper, Jr., provides meat-and-potatoes content for planners working on resilience for coastal areas. Holmes reports that the volume provides a great deal of value and content in one place, recommending it highly for both practitioners and students.
The final book in the section is reviewed by long-time colleague and friend John Carruthers of George Washington University. Carruthers reviews Heather E. Campbell and Elizabeth A. Corley's Urban Environmental Policy Analysis, a book that's been out a few years, but one that may have been overlooked by professionals and academics. Carruthers finds the book succeeds in what it sets out to do, providing broad exposure to contemporary urban environmental policy, and that the book belongs on the shelves of policy planners working on environmental issues.
As always, I welcome suggestions for books, e-books, and apps to be reviewed, offers to complete reviews, and other feedback on the section ([email protected]).