An elegant resource for all who dwell in, or care about, cities. The glossy and—no doubt expensive—illustrations are a real...
A powerful new urban history with implications for today.
British journalist and historian Hunt takes readers to 19th-century England, when “the city was at the heart of public debate.” Thinkers, laborers, moralists, politicians and ordinary middle-class folk lived in, and argued about, urban space. What were the mores of the new industrial city? The Brits were optimistic and, at least through the reign of Victoria, took great civic pride in their cities (the pronoun their is intentional—crucial to Hunt’s argument is the idea that city-dwellers felt a sense of ownership about the cities they lived and worked in). The first third of the text here offers a rich history of ideas as Hunt explores how the likes of Engels and Carlyle understood the city. The middle section focuses on the cultural life of the Victorian city. City-dwellers saw Florence as the model city and did their best to see that Manchester and Birmingham would be seats of hard work and liberty, not to mention art. Determined to show that cities were about more than just crass money-grubbing, the English developed a “proudly urban. . . culture with its endogenous heroes and traditions.” Urbanites created an innovative city infrastructure, with architecture to match. But, eventually, many of them left, and Hunt’s final chapters trace the middle class’s move to the suburbs (an added bonus here are the amusing quotations from The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmiths’ 1892 satire of suburban anomie). This is a story of decline, and for Hunt, it is “tragic” that the “suburbs were increasingly imagined as the natural home of the English people.” One need not scratch too deep to see a critique of our own 21st-century, though Hunt’s specific suggestions for urban reform are limited to the obvious, such as improving city schools.
An elegant resource for all who dwell in, or care about, cities. The glossy and—no doubt expensive—illustrations are a real plus.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-297-60767-7
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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