Book Description

Excerpt from The Century Rural Life Books: The Suburban Trend Of any sociology which this book may contain, much the greater part has been drawn from the author's experience. No one who, for years, has shuttled daily back and forth between suburb and city can have escaped the frequent necessity of formulating his apologia for suburban life. One covers a matter of a quarter of a million miles of distance in about twenty years of fairly average commuting. It is not too much to estimate that at least once for every two hundred miles the commuter has been challenged to defend his faith. Some of these occasions arise incidentally out of friendly exchanges between fellow-commuters. Here is the questioning brother who is doubtful whether or not to give it up and move back to the city; here, on the other hand, the rampant assurance of the neighbor whose zeal for suburban life is still more assertive and robust than one's own. Challenges of another sort come from the commiserations or pleasantries of city dwellers, who keep on contrasting their own happier lots, in season and out. All told, the confirmed suburbanite is virtually compelled to develop a sort of social philosophy about which his numerous observations tend to organize themselves. Enough commuting anecdotes have fastened upon the Erie Railroad alone to supply the essence of quite a respectable suburban sociology. It is in such informal materials that the book has its origins. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.