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Prophetic City

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The kind of soul searching overview that every great city needs. Klineberg’s love for Houston is clear from the jump. Nevertheless, he doesn’t let that apply rose tinted lenses to the view he presents to readers. Particularly revealing are his forays into the color lines that split Houston into so many little cities, each with their own history. If you enjoyed Rothstein’s The Color of Law, you’ll appreciate the tough love Klineberg shows to his city and its history of accommodating business interests at the expense of just about everything else. Apart from the stark black-white split, I felt like the author could have done a better job of giving Houston its multicultural due. As a city that many have claimed has surpassed Austin as Texas’ foodie capital, and some even claim as the nation’s new foodie center, there was precious little about that in Prophetic City. Bbq, pho, ramen, thai, European, New South, and a number of innovative kitchens all call Houston home. We non-Houstonians can only hope that the culinary scene there is one of the things Houston is prophetic about for the rest of us.

Overall, Klineberg’s claim of Houston as sort of a test case for the rest of the nation is fairly weak. That’s not the purpose of the book, despite the title, and that becomes fairly obvious almost immediately. Houston is an extreme example in America, much more akin probably to the boomtowns that have sprung up in China and the Middle East, where hordes of outsiders gather to reap the fleeting rewards of oil or tech or whatever the flavor of the decade is, leaving garish symbols of wealth in their wake in the form of skyscrapers and public art displays. I don’t think you can make the case that other American cities have much to learn from Houston after reading Klineberg’s take. Either your city is older than Houston, and therefore far past any possibility of a similar boom, or it lacks Houston’s unique combination of location and opportunity, and thus will never see the magnitude of Houston’s unfettered growth in such a short span of history. Houston combined a location as the gateway to Texas on the Gulf/Atlantic coast with proximity to unparalleled hydrocarbon deposits, a place in the Sun Belt, and the timing to take advantage of cheap land, construction and the Space Age. This perfect Venn Diagram of scenarios and factors will never occur again.

Instead, Klineberg’s Houston is a cautionary tale: one of the few mammoth metropoli to spring up in the South, a place equally Texan and cosmopolitan, making it a veritable living oxymoron. Can a city look inward and outward at the same time? Forward and backward? The answer is no, making Houston no more prophetic than any other city. Its failure to look outward and forward, at the expense of looking inward and backward (i.e., trying to embrace being Texan and Southern, or at least what it believes those terms to mean) will be its undoing. Because other cities will do it, whether Houston sets the mold for them or not. Nevertheless, this book sheds light on these struggles in the city like only a true expert and insider could provide, and for that - a truly intimate guided tour through the landscape and timeline that was 20th century Houston, Stephen Klineberg deserves a tip of the cap.

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As a native Houstonian, I was excited to read this book. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by the author’s bias and lack of perspective. The book struggles for large portions for being rather academic without the necessary practical context for understanding a place as it truly is. I also found the author’s opinions to be riddled throughout the book, which masqueraded as conclusions from the study.

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A fascinating look at Huston I’ve never been ther but now once we can travel again will be visiting.We are introduced to the history the economy the people who live there,A very interesting book.#netgalley#avidpress

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As someone who grew up in Houston, I was excited to read a book about my city and learn how we would guide the country and world into the future. There is only passing mention of how Houston is a "prophetic city," and the book mostly focuses on the author's sociological surveys and on subjective trends that the author finds encouraging. "Encouraging" could be defined as what matches his political ideology. What is most disappointing about this book is how much the author espouses the viewpoints of uninformed non-Houstonians, such as those from the northeastern United States, who spend much of their time denigrating the city. Houston is a complex place with a complex set of characters, which the author does acknowledge. He does not, however, enlighten the reader into the full scale of this complexity. His arguments stay ideologically one-sided, and he downplays or ignores any disagreement to the point of a straw man. Whether the author lives in a bubble of like-minded individuals or simply does not like any other ideas but his own form of progressivism is unknown, but it does make for a rather boring take on a complex city and culture. The author wastes his opportunity at breaking new ground and instead provides a shallow narrative backed by colorless data that does not match the people who reside in it.

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Thanks to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was so excited to read this book for two reasons. First, I am a native Houstonian and lived there for 27 years. Second, I attended Rice, where Dr. Klineberg teaches, and the course he taught about Houston was one of my all-time favorites.

I really enjoyed this book. It mixes findings from his famous Houston Area Survey with interviews with Houstonians and anecdotes about life in Houston. The first section of the book is a crash course in Houston history and then the book moves into different issues covered by the survey: education, race relations, housing, etc. There are times where the data becomes a bit unwieldy to read, but I think that's to be expected in this type of book, and it never became boring or unreadable. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Houston, but I definitely learned a lot from this book. I also loved the constant emphasis on the importance of education in Houston. Dr. Klineberg makes the case that if Houston doesn't get its act together with its public schools, the city will never live up to its potential and will likely slide backwards. (Of course, much of this is because of the Texas legislature's refusal to adequately fund public education, but that's another issue for another day.)

Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who's interested in Houston or Texas. Houston: It's Worth It!

Review posted on Goodreads on July 26, 2020.

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This is an interesting look at Houston and the longevity of its potential. If the oil industry disappears, there are enough of other industries that have developed to keep the economy there from collapsing. The author also discusses the diverse population that rivals the diversity in New York City.

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