Word: scrubland
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...small prairie town of gold rushers and traders, where the biggest scare was getting hit by a prairie dog. Now it's a stretched finger of the big city, with aspiring families who don't lock their doors, enclaves with names like Coventry and Raccoon Creek and Bel Flower, scrubland turned into golf courses, houses than run anywhere from $75,000 to $5 million or so. There's an arch over a hallway in the high school engraved with a motto: "The finest kids in America pass through these halls...
...novel, Freedomland (Broadway Books; 546 pages; $25), a thriller in which plot grows inevitably from place, and place seems utterly real. The most powerful impression a reader feels in these two novels is the sense, in a scene set in a chaotic emergency room or in the junk-filled scrubland between a black housing project and a shabby white neighborhood, that yes, this is what such a backwater would look like, sound like, smell like. And that this, as events of Price's long, heavy narration grind toward resolution, is how people sheltering in such a place would claw...
...when Duany and Plater-Zyberk were hired by quixotic developer Robert Davis to turn 80 acres of Gulf Coast scrubland into a resort, that they ceased being merely interesting architects and started becoming visionary urban planners. As with all revolutions, the essential idea was simple: instead of building another dull cluster of instant beach-front high- rises, the developer and designers wondered, why not create a genuine town, with shops and lanes and all the unpretentious grace and serendipitous quirks that have always made American small towns so appealing? Thus was born the town of Seaside -- and with...
Baker and a companion are turkey hunting on 1,366 acres of Texas scrubland about 50 miles south of San Antonio, a wild, almost barren part of the U.S. where it is easy to believe that due process is still a bullet. "I call it the Rock Pile Ranch," says Baker, "and that's about all that's on it. Nothing else but some water wells and turkey feeders. Coming here is the closest I get to therapy. I'm not really into material things, but land, well, they're not making any more...
Disney had, of course, savored that triumph long before Jim Bakker was born. And having tasted success with Disneyland in California, he looked for a larger playground. His gaze fell on central Florida. Twenty years ago, the region was not much more than scrubland, orange groves, gas stations and $5-a- night motels. It was a place vacationers drove through, as quickly as possible, on their way to Miami or the Gulf Coast. But just before his death in 1966, the Man with the Mouse had bought, secretly and at the fire-sale price of roughly $200 an acre...