HOMES

A historical overview of changing types of housing in North America.

With an eye to social milestones like the 19th-century Industrial Revolution as well as architectural developments, Lawrence surveys housing from caves to smart homes. She focuses, as the title fails to note, largely on this continent’s indigenous and imported styles and couches her discourse in sweeping claims that, for instance “our earliest ancestors slept in caves” and that now “most things that people need are in the buildings where they live.” Even her attempts at specificity fall prey to bland, decontextualized generalities, such as the suggestion that “Southeastern tribes built” open-sided chickees with no reference to how today’s Indigenous people might live. The illustrations are light on fine structural details, but aside from one scene of uniformly shirtless plains Indians with feathers in their hair, Kang does make an effort to depict human figures with cultural or era-appropriate dress and, in modern group scenes, racial diversity. Though more international in scope, the co-published Transportation, illustrated by Ran Zheng, is just as careless with generalities (“Horseback riding was mainly used for transportation, but men also enjoyed riding on their estates”). Along with more scenes featuring mostly shirtless and/or feather-sporting Native Americans, it presents viewers with a figure in an Arabic keffiyeh astride a two-humped Bactrian camel from eastern Asia and a Wright brothers flyer with no engine. Both volumes end with perfunctory glossaries; neither includes leads to further resources.

Slapdash social history that’s too superficial to nail down the chosen topic.