p>To those who do not have the time to peruse the book from cover to cover, I would recommend reading chapter five, which looks at windows and glass architecture in suburbia. Picture windows have become a trope of suburban life in film and literary narratives. This is possibly because they foreground so many of the tensions elsewhere disguised in suburban design. The separation between inside and outside and the controlled penetration of the outer world into the domestic interior is one such example. Because of unique design strategies, suburban architecture allowed residents to incorporate only those elements of the outside world that did not endanger the family's privacy, such as a constructed image of nature that excluded a vision of the street, and thus of public life.The chapter also gives a sense of the peculiar methodology used to write about suburban interiors as a cultural landscape. Transparency in architecture is addressed through the analysis of actual buildings, such as Richard Neutra's modernist houses and Cliff May's ranches in Los Angeles, but also through imaginary spaces. There is one section examining the role of windows in urban and suburban sitcom narratives like I Love Lucy and The Goldbergs, and another on the depiction of picture windows in Douglas Sirk's film All That Heaven Allows.The first chapter on the rise of the car in the interwar years, a phenomenon that paved the ground for postwar suburban sprawl, is another part that should not be missed in order to understand the driving forces behind suburbanization. The mass relocation of Americans further and further away from the center of cities has often been referred to as “white flight” by many historians and commentators. This term is derived from the fact that most of those who left the city for suburbia were white Americans at a time when the number of African Americans moving into the metropolitan core was on the rise. There is no doubt about the segregationist motives behind the growth of suburbs, but segregation was pursued in several ways besides taking up residence in a newly built subdivision. The very infrastructure of automobile transportation, which is the connecting tissue of the sprawling American city, was devised as a public space that individuals could share without coming into contact with each other thanks to the car's protective interior, a form of microsurgical segregation.I hope Indoor America will speak to a wide audience that is interested in different aspects of America's urban and cultural history. As the current state of U.S. cities makes evident, the development of a self-sufficient interior landscape in the postwar years as the setting of private and public life for most Americans (what we might call the car-garage-house-office-mall complex) did not come without consequences. The steady decline of public transportation, street life, and livable public places that are not owned and run by private companies has contributed to exacerbating and reproducing social inequalities. There is still too little attention paid to architectural preservation, to safeguarding public places from private interests, or to making cities into inclusive places whose spaces can be shared by people from all backgrounds.There are two directions one can look to for improvement: backward and outward. Americans should be encouraged to look outside their country for examples of sound urbanism that has fostered more equal, inclusive and safe communities. To look backward, instead, is to learn from history and turn it into a powerful tool to guide future decisions. Although the book focuses on events that happened long ago and already had an impact on the country's landscape, future urban policies should be informed by a deeper knowledge of the past and of the long-lasting effects of postwar urban visions.I see this book as a story whose ending is still to be written. There are contrasting views among sociologists and urban analysts on whether suburbanization is still under way, or cities are making a comeback with the gentrification of some central areas. However, little progress would be made if places are still designed as defensive oases of privilege and exclusion in the future. Separation and segregation only breed further separation and segregation, ultimately bringing a city's life to an end. I hope that readers will get a sense of where and how things might have gone differently in the past, and of how much can still be done to improve the state of America's urban life in the years to come.