Like so many Americans of Generation X, I grew up in the suburbs, amid homes on large lots facing streets designed for cars, not people. My parents drove me everywhere, until my friends and I could get behind the wheel ourselves. Even then, we never really had anywhere to go. We hung out at the Denny's or in parking lots or in friends' basements -- or, when really desperate, the mall. We never considered (we were teenagers, after all) that there might be an alternative, that the stale, bland suburban life we were living was less than half a century old and completely at odds with the way humans had lived for the previous millennia.

Only later, when I started covering local politics for a small newspaper in Pennsylvania, did I start to understand that the suburbs were a strange construct made possible by American middle-class prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century. One thing that helped me understand this was reading James Howard Kunstler's landmark 1993 book, The Geography of Nowhere, which traced the evolution of American communities from Main Streets and sidewalks to strip malls and culs-de-sac and made an overwhelming case that we are paying huge social and economic costs for our car-crazed lifestyle.

My fellow Gen X journalist Duncan Crary tells pretty much the same story of awakening slowly to the ills of suburbia, but with one difference: the small paper for which he covered local politics was in the town where Kunstler had started his own reporting career. Kunstler, who had settled in nearby Saratoga Springs, New York, and added dystopian novelist to his résumé, became a source for Crary's reporting on suburban land use -- a relationship that has continued throughout Crary's journalism career.

In 2007 Crary discovered podcasting and decided to get Kunstler in front of a microphone for weekly discussions about the "tragic comedy of suburban sprawl." The results, collected in book form as The KunstlerCast: Conversations With James Howard Kunstler, make an enjoyable exploration for Kunstler devotees and newbies alike. Crary leads Kunstler through the arc of his prolific pontificating career, starting with The Geography of Nowhere and proceeding through a series of similarly themed polemics up to The Long Emergency, published in 2005, which predicts a radical shift in our way of life as oil production dwindles and alternative energy sources (in Kunstler's estimation) fail to fill the gap, leading to the downfall of our global consumer culture. (For those who accuse him of being a secretly delighted "doomer," finding joy in apocalyptic scenarios, there's plenty of material in The KunstlerCast to bolster that argument -- though he heartily denies it.)

Crary picked a fortuitous time to get Kunstler on tape: just as the American suburbs he had long denigrated began to show signs of collapse, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis and mortgage debacle. Kunstler's perspective on the causes of collapse and the subsequent bank bailouts and stimulus plans -- a "campaign to sustain the unsustainable" -- is dismal. Home values, he predicts, will continue to sink. Personal wealth will wither. Large swaths of U.S. cities will empty out like Detroit. But Kunstler is convinced our suburban way of life, which he calls "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world," isn't worth saving anyway.

Reading four years of weekly conversations condensed into a book is a somewhat strange experience. Crary, who admits to thinking he had found the easiest way of writing a book ever, does an admirable job of organizing his wide-ranging conversations with Kunstler into a form that's relatively easy to follow. He's mostly an endorsing acolyte, but he does challenge Kunstler on some uncomfortable subjects, including his condemnation of youth culture (our young men have become warrior babies and violent clowns, Kunstler chides).

I found myself lamenting that the book had been finished before the Occupy movement took shape. Surely Kunstler's views would align with the 99% protesters in some respects, but how would he evaluate their message and methods? Fortunately, this is a book whose sequel is, in a sense, already available. The podcasts continue at kunstlercast.com, so it's easy enough to download and find out.