Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
Paperback, 368 pages
English language
Published July 28, 1999 by Marlowe & Company.
One of my favourite books on design, architecture, social gatherings and the societal dimensions of those.
Splendid work with notes on English clubs (male only), Biergärten (German market-like gatherings for families) etc.
I have been dreaming of my own 'third-place' since I read it
I think Oldenburg's thesis is an interesting and important one. Unfortunately, however, this really ought to have been an essay or an article, 5000-10000 words long, not a whole book. Most of the time his writing sounds long-winded and preachy, which makes reading it very tiring, because you expend a lot of energy extracting his main arguments from all the extraneous fluff, and then holding on to them until he moves on to the next point, which may be paragraphs or even pages away. Honestly, I struggled to get through it, and have up after the first three chapters. Skimmed the rest. I think most people would be better off just looking the subject up on Wikipedia.
