As he noted in his history of the suburbs, "Crabgrass Frontier," communities such as Riverdale were dependent on new transportation systems, which made possible a commute to a city's business centers.

The equally worthy suburban counterpart has the somewhat less grand title, "Crabgrass Frontier."

Professor Jackson, the author of "Crabgrass Frontier" and a Columbia University historian, argued that the sense of community that suburban revisionists are reporting could be a fragile one.

For some reason it often takes books that are somewhat afield or specialized (Kenneth Jackson's "Crabgrass Frontier" comes to mind) to chart the field of architecture.

He is the author of "Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States" (Oxford University Press).

The main overview is Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier (1987).

As Kenneth T. Jackson points out in his book Crabgrass Frontier, "the first really significant defeat for the consolidation movement came when Brookline spurned Boston."

"Crabgrass Frontier," its fuse ticking away in the obscurity of scholarly exchange, is a mine set under some of the more important load-bearing pillars of the current social order.

Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia and author of "Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States," agreed.

His major work, "Crabgrass Frontier" (Oxford, 1985), a largely critical study of suburbia, won the Bancroft Prize.