The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Creating the North American Landscape)

Like Metro itself, this book is awe inspiring in its scope and remarkable in its detail. The thesis is maintained throughout. The maps are excellent for those, like myself, without a firm grasp of the region's geography. The chapters are clear and focused. It took me a year of bus rides to work though the book, and found myself swept along. I have to admit to being surprised (though not incredulous as the explanation is as clear as any book I have encountered) several times. It was an excellent page-turner throughout... the freeways planed to devour communities, the bridge, the political intransigence, the buses, the plans, and the people. I was lucky enough to fly across the country to visit the District as a kid. The museums and monuments blended in my young imagine with Metro itself as a vision of America set in stone (since I didn't know it was concrete). What I did not know then is that this interaction of Americans in the commons was created as carefully, and painfully, as any monument. Although written before the Tysons Corner extension on the Silver Line, the book contrasts the development of Tysons Corner with Rosslyn-Ballston expertly.

To a third generation Washingtonian, this book got everything right and in a most readable way.Local and national, history at its best. A book about building a subway usually would not be considered a page turner. This one briskly moves along, better than Metro in its current state of disrepair. The author really gets the zeitgeist of each decade, especially the 1950s and early 60s. As a journalist who started his career at the old Evening Star, it is dismaying to read how the Star and Post both enthusiastically lined up behind plans, which fortunately did not come to fruition, to turn this city into a mass of concrete and highways.

This is a college professor's history of the construction of the DC Metro system, so it might have been stuffy.Instead, it is very readable, and many aspects of how the Nation changed culturally show up in the book. It covers the design of the system, and the construction challenges, but perhaps more interestingly it covers the cultural and political history of putting the system in place...something I doubt could be initiated today. The place of people of color, people with disabilities, people from economically disadvantaged areas, and women each figure prominently in the story, as does the continuing battle between the road and mass transit for government funding and rights-of-way.

Very appealing to me having a master's degree in transportation engineering. Significant details of political challenges for system construction.

I am an engineer currently working for WMATA. This book does a great job explaining the roles of the various agencies involved in the planning of metro and the formation of WMATA. It properly puts into perspective how difficult a political problem it was to plan and construct the system in the face of highway proposals, protests from other agencies and locals, and the inherent problem within tri-jurisdictional control.If you live in DC and are genuinely interested in public transit, read this.

As evidenced by the numerous references, the author has been quite thorough in his research. However, the amount of detail bogs down the story, and it is quite easy to lose the greater picture. It would have served the story better to footnote most of the names and organizations. Of special note, however, are the drawings and photos from the period. Overall, this book is a good complement to others regarding the history of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, such as "The Pentagon: A History", "Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington D.C.", and especially, "Freedom Rising:Washington in the Civil War." In addition to the main subject, the book touches on themes addressed in other books regarding urban development, such as the "City Beautiful" movement that was popularized after the Chicago World Expo of the 1890's, "urban planning", immiment domain, "smart growth", and the boundaries between public and private interests in influencing the development of a metropolitan area. Other books that touch on these themes include Janet Jacobs' seminal work "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", as well as "Edge City, Life on the New Frontier", which devotes a large section to the evolution of the Tysons Corner area, and even "The Levittowners", a 1961 work which takes a sociological view of families migrating to Levittown, PA, a small surburban enclave of Philadelphia that was a developed by one of the nation's largest builders at the time, akin to today's Toll Brothers, perhaps. Lastly, if you would like to explore the idea of completely planned communities, such as Greenbelt, MD, which was a product of the New Deal era, consider reading works dating back to the Utopian movement of the late 1800s, such as Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward", and the ideas of Robert Owen, who created an experimental enclave in Scotland, and attempted to establish one in the U.S. as well. In the end, as I read these diverse works it helped me shape my own ideas regarding the public/private balance over land use and development. It's an interesting journey that enhanced my understanding of the issues, but yet I still feel overwhelmed by magnitude of the issue. Perhaps we will indeed evolve to the types of cities imagined by Isaac Asimov in his "Foundation Series" of books.

This book is incredibly well researched and thought out. Its thesis is proved not by beating you over the head but by the historical record. Moreover, it's quite a page turner. My only quibble would be the organization in the middle; in my opinion it tended to bounce between chronological and topical. That is a small price to pay for this great read. I recommend this book.

The book arrived on time and as described. I purchased it as a replacement for a neighbor who loaned me her copy.