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| Suburban Sprawl | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard E. Dansky
Publisher: Amazon
Category: Book
Buy New: $0.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 1705012
Media: Digital
Pages: 23
ASIN: B000E4FIK4
Publication Date: December 23, 2005
Availability: Available for download now
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
My wife and I bought our house in part because it was well away from strip malls, prefab house farms and the like. Unfortunately, the development in our neighborhood has been taking place at methamphetamine speed. I came back from an extended business trip and found that while I was gone, a lovely tract of forest had been chopped down, plowed up, and otherwise prepped for an incoming Food Lion. I saw that gash of raw, red clay just sitting there bleeding mud into the street – it was over a year before they actually started construction – and thought about the angry forest taking it back. That’s where this story came from.
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| Customer Reviews:
A happy ending...of sorts... January 21, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Richard Dansky again provides readers a visceral and intense story about the effects of sprawl and how one man with a mission can change the world. Mr. Dansky's writing style makes you feel the wind whip around you, the earth sink beneath your feet. The reader can hear the cicadas groaning, the trees sighing. His writing is replete with humor and witty comments that add to the overall characterization. The people who inhabit his stories are you, me and the family next door. They act in every way as we would act and this makes the story even more powerful.
My one complaint, if you can even call it that, is that it I wanted more. I wanted there to be more exposition, more of the main character's pain at watching the trees disappear, more of his wife's desire to leave and more sadness at seeing what sprawl is doing to nature.
Don't get me wrong, though. The story still works and it packs a whallop! As the last paragraph rolls around, some might disagree that it is a happy ending to this wonderful story. However, you WILL be asking yourself just how bad a world without suburban sprawl would really be.
 POWERFUL! THOUGHT-PROVOKING! March 19, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
To my knowledge, I've never read a story by a man who also designs video games. My grandkids relate more to that, but from my own experience as a writer I know that what I am in my everyday life has nothing to do with the places my imagination can take me when I start writing.
I was a bit intimidated to start this story, but when I did I received a delightful surprise: video game designers are not that weird, after all! (Joke!) Richard Dansky is a superb writer, and his cast of characters are just like me, my family, and many of my neighbors ... REAL people.
His characters' think much like you and I do ... caring for our world, our environment and our neighborhoods.
This is an intense story with real people trying to figure out what to do about urban sprawl, showing how one person can make a difference. This story poses questions, some with answers, others without.
Dansky's style is very descriptive, making for an exciting, often humorous, and always smooth read.
A powerful little story. Highly recommended. - review by Betty Dravis, author of the Amazon Short "V.O."
Danksy--A Subtle Algernon Blackwood April 29, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an excellent story, very reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood's "The Man Whom the Trees Loved." There is the same theme that runs through both Blackwood's and Dansky's stories: the power of nature over man and the belief that man has the ability to unleash such power. This tale will make you think twice the next time you look at a tree or a shopping mall.
 A-Must-Not-Read September 1, 2006
I realize that fiction is just that-fiction, but this story insults our intelligence with it's trees-over-taking-the-world scenerio, and started out good but faded into cartoonish at lightening speed. A must-read ONLY if your stuck in the "john" and have nothing else handy.
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