The suburbs now hold the balance of power in American politics. Scholars and journalists have explored the means by which the federal government has shaped the character and enhanced the power of suburbs, and considered the ramifications of this shift for national politics. Yet, our understandings have been narrowed by the assumption that suburban towns are singular in nature, essentially interchangeable. The New Suburban History, edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, punctures this myth by revealing that suburbs are not, nor have ever been, as racially, economically and culturally homogeneous as they are often believed to be. Sprawling far and wide, the authors examine high-tech suburbs (Margaret Pugh O'Mara), black suburbanization (Andrew Wiese) and industry-dependent suburbs (Robert O. Self), among other topics.

The first two essays do not explore as much new ground as those that follow. David M.P. Freund's ‘Marketing the free market’ and Arnold R. Hirsch's ‘Less than Plessy’ review the largely hidden ways that the federal government shaped practices of racial and economic exclusion in suburbia. Other authors identify aspects of suburbia that those who were raised in such environments, or live there now, will find unsurprising: suburbs compete against one another as much as they do against cities (Self), and many include considerable diversity (Michael Jones-Correa). Nevertheless, these analyses compel readers to think more deeply about the political economy of suburban America. This is the book's major contribution.

In ‘Reshaping the American dream’, Jones-Correa smartly focuses on the suburbs of Washington, DC, to ponder the ways in which the evolving demography of these localities, which have experienced substantial increases in their foreign-born populations, have changed the nature of local politics. To take one example, Jones-Correa speculates: ‘It may be that issues that were once thought of as allocative (school funding, waste disposal, the placement of new roads, the provision of an adequate water supply) now take on distributive dimensions, for instance, moving tax revenue from property owners (disproportionately non-Hispanic whites) to schools (where the students are often the children of new immigrant and ethnic minorities’ (p. 188). Issues such as growth policies have become intertwined with questions of race and ethnicity. Where one person sees slow-growth policies as environmentally friendly efforts that improve the quality of life for residents, another sees a thinly veiled attempt to limit the number of immigrants and/or people of colour in town.

Taking a different tack from the other essayists, Becky Nicolaides' ‘How hell moved from the city to the suburbs’ traces how intellectuals shifted the blame for alienation and isolation in modern life from urban to suburban settings. Later suburban critiques – most famously, William H. Whyte's Organization Man – pointed to a suffocating sense of community as the source of ‘hell’. In Nicolaides' view, these conflicting narratives about the links between physical setting and authentic community created intellectual blind spots, obscuring the range of settings in which community might flourish, and paying insufficient attention to political power and inequality, particularly with respect to racial exclusion. Nicolaides leaves some provocative questions for other scholars to answer: ‘If the suburbs offered only social anguish and failure, why did Americans keep moving to them in ever-rising numbers?. . .Why would African Americans be willing to risk vandalism, cross burnings, and violence, for the opportunity to live in these social wastelands?’ (p. 96).

Ultimately, the most important difference between cities and suburbs is not cultural, but political. In the USA, thousands of autonomous, suburban governments compete for residents and businesses that will demand little from them, thus diminishing the prospects for collective solutions to social problems. (Unfortunately, this edited volume does not address the extent to which other industrialized democracies are facing and addressing similar issues.) The final essay, by Gerald Frug, enumerates the legal means by which suburbs ‘cherry pick’ their residents via practices such as exclusionary zoning, and separate different classes of residents within their boundaries through devices such as school tracking, and homeowners' associations acting as quasi-governments. The New Suburban History paints a rather sobering picture of the ‘what's in it for me?’ mentality prevalent in suburban politics. This is distressing not only because suburban localities hold the strongest hand in American politics, but because, as Frug notes, they are not the only municipal governments that seek to lure taxpayers and shun tax-users. They simply have more powerful tools with which to accomplish their goals.