This book takes its name, I believe, from the book Natural History of Vacant Lots. This is a lovely series of meditations about the edgelands between the built world and the unbuilt-feeling parts at its edges. Brown is a person you may know, he’s written some scifi, has a terrific newsletter and has a funky house in an industrial part of Austin. He talks about the things he discovers, the way he thought and thinks about these spaces, how his thinking changed when he became a parent. Not just “I wish we were wild” nostalgia. Thinky and worth it