Cities
The First 6,000 Years
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Cities
Narrated by:
Monica L. Smith
Buy Now for €15.48
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Narrated by:
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Monica L. Smith
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By:
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Monica L. Smith
"This is a must-read book for any city dweller with a voracious appetite for understanding the wonders of cities and why we're so attracted to them."--Zahi Hawass, author of Hidden Treasures of Ancient Egypt
A sweeping history of cities through the millennia--from Mesopotamia to Manhattan--and how they have propelled Homo sapiens to dominance.
Six thousand years ago, there were no cities on the planet. Today, more than half of the world's population lives in urban areas, and that number is growing. Weaving together archeology, history, and contemporary observations, Monica Smith explains the rise of the first urban developments and their connection to our own. She takes readers on a journey through the ancient world of Tell Brak in modern-day Syria; Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan in Mexico; her own digs in India; as well as the more well-known Pompeii, Rome, and Athens. Along the way, she presents the unique properties that made cities singularly responsible for the flowering of humankind: the development of networked infrastructure, the rise of an entrepreneurial middle class, and the culture of consumption that results in everything from take-out food to the tell-tale secrets of trash.
Cities is an impassioned and learned account full of fascinating details of daily life in ancient urban centers, using archaeological perspectives to show that the aspects of cities we find most irresistible (and the most annoying) have been with us since the very beginnings of urbanism itself. She also proves the rise of cities was hardly inevitable, yet it was crucial to the eventual global dominance of our species--and that cities are here to stay.
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However, one chapter is not enough to save a whole book. Indeed, contrary to what its title implies, this work is anything but a history of cities from their inception to the present. Written by an archeologist, it presents a hodgepodge of information tidbits with huge jumps in time and space literally from one paragraph to the next. Thus, the reader can sense no logical thread to the presentation.
Worse, the author failed to check many of her assertions with competent experts. Cities did not appear over a 10-year period like the Internet. ‘Lucy’ was not a homo sapiens and lived over 3 million years ago, long before any city was built. Constantinople was chosen as the seat of a major Christian Church and, renamed Istanbul, technically retains that status today for the Orthodox Faith.
The last straw in the audio version is that the author narrates the book herself and, well, clearly does not have the talent to do so.
There is no reason whatsoever to recommend this work to anyone.
Exceptionally Hollow!
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