An engaging, insightful, and frequently entertaining book about a subject that has been a source of both much nostalgia and derision: the American mall. It's also a subject that a lot of us think we know something about—because we’ve all shopped at malls. Alexandra Lange, a design and architecture critic, admits to having been a bit apprehensive at first about approaching the mall as a subject of serious study. But she says many people were eager to tell her their own mall stories when they learned of her project. She describes the mall as “an architecture born to be malleable,” and tracing its evolution from the 1950s, she refutes the widespread notion that malls are dead.