San Antonio College Library

Nancy Botwin is a soccer mom who had to learn how to deal - pot, that is - after the death of her husband. Now, her business is a hit. But keeping up with the neighbors in this suburban utopia isn't easy. She is joined up with a few of her closest friends, and together they face life's ups and downs - because even in paradise, nobody's perfect.

After her husband's unexpected death and subsequent financial woes, suburban mom Nancy Botwin embraces a new profession: the neighborhood pot dealer. As it seems like everyone secretly wants what she's selling, even city councilman Doug Wilson, Nancy is faced with keeping her family life in check and her enterprise a secret from her best friend/PTA president, Celia Hodes.

Discusses America's retreat from the cities, back to Thomas Jeferson's vision of an agrarian utopia, and the economic and social consequences at the beginning of a new millennium.

Americans dream of owning a single-family homeâ₂?ideally in some leafy Arcadia not too far from the city workplace. There are many shapes to this dreamâ₂?Gothic cottages and mini-castles surrounded by manicured wilderness, like the first planned suburban development in Llewellyn Park, N.J.; detached dwellings in sylvan surroundings, with restrictive land use and minimum cost regulations (Olmstead and Vauz' Riverside); the company town, whose...

In The End of the Suburbs journalist Leigh Gallagher traces the rise and fall of American suburbia from the stately railroad suburbs of the early 19th and 20th centuries to current-day sprawling exurbs where residents spend as much as four hours each day commuting. She shows why suburbia was unsustainable from the start and explores the hundreds of new, alternative communities that are springing up around the country and promise to reshape our way...

"This Land tells the untold story of development in America - how the landscape is shaped by a furious clash of political, economic, and cultural forces. It is the story of the burgeoning anti-sprawl movement, a 1960s-style revolution of New Urbanism, smart growth, and green building. And it is the story of landowners fighting back on the basis of property rights, with free-market libertarians, home builders, road pavers, financial institutions, and...

"More people than ever are living in North America's suburbs. But are the suburbs becoming more unmanageable in the face of the rapidly changing social, technological, and environmental conditions of the twenty-first century? Are the planning processes that regulated development in the suburbs for the last fifty years breaking down? Will suburban sprawl continue to be the inevitable result?" "Planning the New Suburbia challenges established planning...

The author explores "the decentralized spread of California's Silicon Valley, the crowded streets of New York City's Jackson Heights neighborhood, the controlled growth of Portland, Oregon, and the stage-set facades of Disney's planned community, Celebration, Florida," and argues that the real forces of shaping cities--transportation systems, industry and business, and political decision making--have been ignored.--Cover.

In Picture Windows, Baxandall and Ewen shatter naive stereotypes of suburban life, replacing them with a clear and compelling historical analysis that situates the development of the suburbs in relation to the pivotal issues of postwar American life. They examine the years from World War II to the present, chronicling the transformation of rural lands into tidy, uniform subdevelopments that promised all of the comforts of postwar technology. The building...

Langdon investigates how factors such as houses, stores, and transportation can generate frustration or contribute to a more congenial way of life, depending on the community design.