A journey through 7,000 years and twenty-six world cities that shows how urban living has been the spur and incubator to humankind's greatest innovations.
... [an] excellent, thought-provoking, heady urban chronicle ... Like the urban venues that Mr. Wilson cherishes, this book can be tortuous. A given chapter might nominally be about Paris, London, medieval Baghdad or New York, but some metropolitan detail will prompt forays through time and space. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling, frazzling, sometimes both simultaneously. Metropolis teems with information and observations; therefore it isn’t too difficult to cavil about certain judgments and omissions. For instance, why didn’t the Paris section discuss the Paris Commune, an event that played a momentous role in French history? On a lighter note, the 1964 New York World’s Fair is disdained as 'an embarrassing and costly failure.' I take exception to that: My friends and I loved it ... More often, Metropolis occasioned some intriguing reflections ... Fear not, dear reader; don’t be dismayed by the author’s apparent promotion of chaos. He is really eminently sensible, as when he says that, from the early days of Uruk to now, 'the basic principles of urban life have not changed all that much.'
... Wilson’s fascinating history of cities, Metropolis, lacks a central thesis (its only significant flaw), but it’s not hard to supply one: cities intensify life ... In construction, Wilson’s book is more rambling east London than centrally planned Haussmann Paris. His progress is roughly chronological and the only reliable theme is that with each chapter the cities get bigger. By the final chapter we’ve reached megacities that are so enormous they are changing the course of nature ... Wilson is cheery by the book’s final pages.
... perhaps it’s not the ideal moment to publish Metropolis, an ode to cities and cosmopolitan life as 'humankind’s greatest invention,' according to its subtitle. In a hastily added few paragraphs in the introduction ... In fact, considering that many urban innovations are responses to disasters, perhaps it’s just the right moment for such a book ... Beyond the enduring seduction and economic and environmental benefits of cities, Metropolis has the added virtue of Wilson as an erudite, creative guide to the history of civilization through its great urban areas. He is a voracious, eclectic reader and an artful deployer of quotations, from Plato to N.W.A. ... He has a reporter’s eye for freshness ... Wilson is a sensualist, chronicling the sexual and gastronomical draw of densely packed people. He loves descriptive lists ... At this current scary moment, when crowded cities can seem dangerous, even life-threatening, looking at history to see what emerges from the other side is instructive in imagining what can come next.
