Good picture collection but not exactly reading material

Where We Lived: Discovering the Places We Once Called Home
by Jack Larkin

Lots of pictures--most interesting were the ones of places that no longer exist in modern times. One of the WPA projects of the thirties was to photograph and document old buildings of interesting historical aspect. So he assembled these pictures, and others, into a pictographic history of American home architecture.

Oddly enough, it was the breadth of the book that exhausted me, and at the end, I was just flipping pages. I have an interest in architecture and a great interest in building materials and an immense interest in Americana, yet still I didn't feel like I learned much of interest with this. A lot more words might have done it--for example, if he'd started with a building style, explained briefly how the "bones" were put together, why it was popular, and when and where, then the pictures would have pulled it all together. That would have been a complete reversal of how I encountered the book: instead of pictures plus captions, it would have been engaging information plus illustrative examples.