Press Release - May 14, 2001

Connecticut Green Party
P.O. Box 231214, Hartford, CT 06123
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Glenn Cheney (860) 822-1270 or
Tom Ethier (860) 243-1000 x-124 (days) or (860) 496-8947 (evenings).

On Tuesday evening May 22nd, the Torrington Historic Preservation Trust and the local chapter of the Connecticut Green Party will sponsor a program by author, James H. Kunstler. The lecture and slide show will focus on the history of urban and suburban development and the future of our cities. The event, titled Parking Lot Nation, will take place at 7:30 PM in the Trinity Church Upper Parish Hall at 220 Prospect Street in Torrington. Admission is free.

James Howard Kunstler of Saratoga Springs, New York is the author of two books on the subject of place and environment. His first, The Geography of Nowhere - the Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape, traces the development of cities and other urban centers with a particular emphasis on architectural aspects and styles. The book describes how our landscape has been turned into sprawlscape marked by cartoon architecture and a ravaged countryside.

In his follow up book, Home from Nowhere - Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century, Kunstler chronicles what made our cities and towns peaceful and pleasant places to shop, work and live and how that changed in post-war America. More importantly he prescribes through examples how we can recapture the American dream of place and fashion cities and towns to include the features that we once built instinctively.

In addition to The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, Mr. Kunstler is the author of eight novels including The Halloween Ball and An Embarrassment of Riches. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues.

Mr. Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere "because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work." Home From Nowhere is a continuation of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of it appeared as the cover story in the September 1996 Atlantic Monthly.

Mr. Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He worked as a staff reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine after he graduated from State University of New York. He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA , the APA., and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

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