"Yesterday's Tomorrows"

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future (Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan)

After finishing a book but before writing a review, I like going to Amazon and reading the reviews there to sharpen my own thoughts. Most of the time this helps me distill down what I want to write, but sometimes the Amazon authors sum it up so succiently that I'm thrown for a loop. In this case, the top rated Amazon review for this book is titled "Fun but not enough", and that really does sum the whole book up in four words. This book was written to accompany a museum exhibition, and as a result it's stuck inbetween two poles - it isn't just photographs of old visions of the future but neither is it a comprehensive history of the idea, and ultimately it fails to succeed totally on either level. It comes closer with the photographs, which are quite nice but there aren't enough of; the accompanying text gives enough information to whet the appetite but not much else. There's two other minor complaints I have, one being that the book is a little unusually shaped and hurt my arm after holding it up for two chapters (rest it on the sofa!), and the second being that the book came out in 1983, so there's one section that reads like "Will Xanadu foam houses catch on?!" (Spoiler alert: lol, no.) To be fair, neither of these are big complaints - the book's shape isn't that out of the ordinary for an art book, and being old happens to all of us eventually. Added all up, this is probably not the book you're looking for unless your collection must have every book about the retro future, in which case you don't even need to read this review, so, um.

Grade: B-