2 min read
Books on Cities: Witold Rybczynski, City Life (1995)
The American shopping mall emerged in the nineteen-fifties, during which the United States became at once more affluent and less urban. “The
Tag : Books On Cities
2 min read
2 min read
Books on Cities: Joan Didion, Miami (1987)
Joan Didion is associated with no place more than southern California. Yet she also spent two major stretches of her life in New York, one from the
2 min read
Books on Cities: A. N. Wilson, London: A History (2004)
London is a world city. Los Angeles, where I used to live, is less a world city than, as I once saw a banner at the airport call it, a “city
2 min read
Books on Cities: Donald Richie, Tokyo (1999)
Donald Richie closes his most personal book on Tokyo by quoting from his own diary. The entry dates from the summer of 1978, more than twenty years
1 min read
Books on Cities: Shawn Micallef, Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness (2017)
I’ve just returned from a few weeks in Toronto, a city with which I find myself in a not-quite-expected relationship. It started seven years ago,
1 min read
Books on Cities: Jonathan Raban, Soft City
Luchino Visconti’s White Nights (Le notti bianche) loosely adapts the eponymous Dostoevsky short story, transposing it from Saint Petersburg
1 min read
Books on Cities: Lewis Mumford, The City in History
“Don’t set out to raze all shrines — you’ll frighten men,” declares Ellsworth Toohey, villain of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
1 min read
Books on Cities: Sam Anderson, Boom Town (2018)
When I fantasize about living in Oklahoma City, I mentally install myself in the Regency Tower, a 24-story downtown apartment building put up in the
2 min read
Books on Cities: Jan Morris, Hong Kong (1988/1997)
When Jan Morris died this past November, her fellow writer of place Pico Iyer saluted her on Twitter as “the kindest, shrewdest and most
2 min read
Books on Cities: Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt, The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design (2020)
When a podcast hits it big, it becomes something else: ideally a streaming television series, that most prestigious of all 21st-century cultural
2 min read
Books on Cities: Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries (2008)
We who write about cities obviously have an interest in the city as a subject. But I suspect we value it even more as a nexus of subjects, an
2 min read
Books on Cities: Lawrence Osborne, Paris Dreambook (1990)
“You can’t have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers,” Michael Tilson Thomas once declared. “They simply define what music
2 min read
Books on Cities: Michael Sorkin, All Over the Map (2011)
When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the United States, Michael Sorkin became one of its earliest high-profile casualties. He died in New York
2 min read
Books on Cities: Jason Horton, Abandoned and Historic Los Angeles (2020)
When you hear something described as “only in L.A.,” rest assured of its being neither unique to nor representative of Los Angeles. Take,
2 min read
Books on Cities: Rem Koolhaas, “Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan” (1978)
When Rem Koolhaas published Delirious New York in 1978, he hadn’t yet built his best-known work. Central China Television Headquarters was 35