What Street Trees Tell Us About Our Cities – A Review of “Seeing Trees”

November 17, 2021.Reading time 7 minutes.

Dümpelmann, Sonja. Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Sara E. Levine Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin by Sonja Dümpelmann is more than a history of street trees in two cities. It is about politics […]

Open Pit Mining Boom and Bust in Butte — A Review of “The City that Ate Itself”

November 9, 2021.Reading time 11 minutes.

Leech, Brian James. The City that Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and its Expanding Berkeley Pit. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018. Reviewed by Troy A. Halsell Butte, Montana, is an interesting place. When I first visited the city in the spring of 2019, its turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture in the uptown central business district and its ubiquitous […]

Beyond Nowhere – A Review of “The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City”

October 14, 2021.Reading time 13 minutes.

Peeples, Scott. The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katherine J. Kim That we still associate the name Edgar Allan Poe with torture, insanity, loneliness, perversity, drug abuse, and drunkenness is owing in part to one Rufus Griswold, rival and author of perhaps […]

Is This Placemaking Success Transferable? A Review of “Learning from Bryant Park: Revitalizing Cities, Towns, and Public Spaces”

September 9, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

Manshel, Andrew W. Learning From Bryant Park: Revitalizing Cities, Towns, and Public Spaces. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katie Uva On an August night in 1993, I was five years old and sitting in Bryant Park on a blanket on a lush bed of grass with my parents, their friends, and […]

Visions and Realities — A Review of “New York, New York, New York”

August 17, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

Dyja, Thomas. New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021. Reviewed by Bob Carey To get at what Thomas Dyja is after in his new book, begin with the epilogue. Having drawn us into a lengthy but spirited chronicle which begins in the seventies […]

A Crucible of Modern Global Capitalism–A Review of “Made in Hong Kong”

July 28, 2021.Reading time 15 minutes.

Hamilton, Peter E. Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Reviewed by James Watson-Krips There are few places in the world quite like Hong Kong. Billed as “Asia’s World City,” it is today celebrated as much for its striking cityscape as its vibrant street […]

Governing a City in the West Bank — A Review of “Mayor”

July 22, 2021.Reading time 9 minutes.

Mayor. Directed by David Osit. Rosewater Pictures, LLC, 2020. Reviewed by Maytal Mark City branding is not the topic one expects to dwell on in a documentary about Palestinian civil engineer and Ramallah mayor Musa Hadid. But Mayor director David Osit’s camera returns repeatedly to the visual symbol of the city’s prominent “WeRamallah” sign, built […]

East German Influence on Urban Vietnam — A Review of “Building Socialism”

July 19, 2021.Reading time 7 minutes.

Schwenkel, Christina. Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katherine Zubovich By 1973, a decade of repeated U. S. air strikes had left the northern Vietnamese city of Vinh in ruins. In the coming years, Vinh would be rebuilt with the help of […]

Skyscrapers and Stalinism — A Review of “Moscow Monumental”

July 14, 2021.Reading time 8 minutes.

Zubovich, Katherine. Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Zinaida Osipova While many people seek to understand why the Soviet Union fell apart, Katherine Zubovich focuses on one of its enduring successes—the seven skyscrapers designed under Joseph Stalin that still dominate Moscow’s landscape. […]

China’s Overlooked Small Towns — A Review of “China in One Village”

July 8, 2021.Reading time 6 minutes.

Hong, Liang. China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Future of the World. Translated by Emily Goedde. New York: Verso Books, 2021. Reviewed by Lei Zhang Good scholarly accounts of life in rural China have been scant of late, because of a dearth of accounts written by people acquainted with small-town […]

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Category: Book Reviews