Customer Reviews

Cityscapes

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The destruction of the World Trade Center has altered the New York City skyline forever and has forced people to confront a new image of New York. The next generation of New York observers will only know the Towers from their images - several magnificant ones appear in this book's final chapter.

Cityscapes is more than just a history of New York City and it is more than simply a book of beaufitul pictures. It is a unique social history that explores the timely question of how New York, the City, has been both constructed and reflected in images captured over four hundred years.

So far, this is my favorite book of New York City history.

There is no place like New York, and there is no book about New York like this one. As revealing as the superb choice of photos, sketches and maps are, so is the narrative story linked with the visual: colonial seaport blossoming into a republican town, fragmented city becoming the immigrant metropolis, and finally the cosmopolitan community and global village we celebrate today. The authors have opened for us vista after vista and close-up after close-up of the poignancy and power of this magnificently restless, creative and changing Empire City.

The day Cityscapes arrived brought me back to the city of my childhood and of my family and closest friends. Page after page of wonderful photographs, of history remembered and learned yet again. So many places visited with my elementary school field trips and then revisited years later on my brief stays in New York. Cityscapes offers a visual feast as well as an intellectual journey to places and people seen years ago, but only now understood in historical context.

A month or so after I fell into Cityscapes, I was delighted to host a young couple from New York. They saw the book on my coffee table and picked it up. Hours later, the two of them were still pouring over the book, learning new and fascinating slices of urban life in their recently adopted city.

Just as New York offers something for everyone, Cityscapes brings light to the eyes of anyone who opens its cover and enters its world.