Jane Holtz Kay, architectural writer extraordinaire, is touching our hearts again with an expanded version of her classic l980 book, "Lost Boston."
A good writer uses all the senses to capture life's details. Holtz Kay does so both in memory and in the moment, whether she is recalling campaigning in the neighborhoods with her late dad, Jackson Holtz, a pol, or is casting a critical eye on the latest of what passes for improvement in this old city.
Today, as when the book first appeared 20 years ago, the text and photos prompt you to wish somebody could invent an H.G.Wells time machine to transport you back to the narrow alleys, storefronts and architectural glories lost less to natural disasters than to man-made ones.
Bostonians have done a better job lately in preserving their heritage, she acknowledges in a new chapter, but she agonizes, "Most poignantly, this epilogue, an elegy in time and space, records how Boston has continued to succumb to the ravages of American the Evanescent, how its citizens have gnawed away the fine-grained textures of this town, and often downright wasted it. In this historic city, as elsewhere, what the l9th century valued, the 20th century jettisoned."