Two reader recs: urban/nature picks

Two recent nonfiction books are converging on the same subject: what roads do to cities, and what roads do to wildlife. (megankimble.com) (bengoldfarb.com) Megan Kimble’s *City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways* was published by Crown on April 2, 2024. Ben Goldfarb’s *Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet* was published by W. W. Norton on September 12, 2023. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (wwnorton.com) (amazon.com) Kimble’s book stays mostly in Texas and follows fights over Interstate 35 in Austin, Interstate 45 in Houston, and Interstate 345 in Dallas. A review in *Transfers* said the book uses those three highways as case studies through residents, officials, and community groups. (texasstandard.org) (escholarship.org) Goldfarb’s book ranges across the United States and other countries to explain “road ecology,” the study of how roads change animal and plant life nearby. His publisher says the book argues the damage goes far beyond roadkill, even though about 1 million animals are killed by cars each day in the United States alone. (bengoldfarb.com) (wwnorton.com) Read together, the books treat highways as more than transportation projects. Kimble writes about displacement, segregation, and emissions in urban neighborhoods, while Goldfarb writes about habitat fragmentation, noise, and barriers to migration in ecosystems cut by pavement. (megankimble.com) (penguinrandomhouse.com) (bengoldfarb.com) (undark.org) The overlap is concrete: the same highway can remove homes in one neighborhood and block animal movement a few miles away. *City Limits* frames that through urban policy and local politics; *Crossings* frames it through ecology, field science, and wildlife crossings. (bookbrowse.com) (undark.org) Both books also arrive as highway building remains a live policy issue, especially in fast-growing Sun Belt metros and in conservation debates over new road capacity. Kimble’s author page says highways “locked us into a high-emissions future,” and Goldfarb’s site says 15 million additional miles of road are scheduled to be built globally in coming years. (megankimble.com) (bengoldfarb.com) The critical reception tracks that split focus. *Crossings* was named a best book of 2023 by outlets including *The New York Times*, *The New Yorker*, *Smithsonian*, *Science News*, and *Kirkus*, according to Norton and Goldfarb’s site, while *City Limits* has been reviewed as a book about how highway policy shapes inequality and daily urban life. (wwnorton.com) (bengoldfarb.com) (lareviewofbooks.org) (englewoodreview.org) For readers who want one lane into city politics and another into environmental science, these are companion books about the same infrastructure. One asks what highways have done to people who live beside them; the other asks what roads have done to the rest of the living world. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (wwnorton.com)