BookShared
  • MEMBER AREA    
  • Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

    (By Ben Wilson)

    Book Cover Watermark PDF Icon Read Ebook
    ×
    Size 21 MB (21,080 KB)
    Format PDF
    Downloaded 584 times
    Last checked 8 Hour ago!
    Author Ben Wilson
    “Book Descriptions: From a brilliant young historian, a colorful 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.

    In the two hundred millennia of our existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. Historian Ben Wilson, author of bestselling and award-winning books on British history, now tells the grand, glorious story of how city living has allowed human culture to flourish. Beginning with Uruk, the world's first city, dating to 5000 BC and memorably portrayed in the Epic of Gilgamesh, he shows us that cities were never a necessity but that once they existed their density created such a blossoming of human endeavor--producing new professions, forms of art, worship, and trade--that they kick-started nothing less than civilization.

    Guiding readers through famous cities over 7,000 years, he reveals the innovations driven by each: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Epoque Paris. In the modern age, he studies the impact of verticality in New York City, the sprawl of L.A., and the eco-reimagining of twenty-first-century Shanghai.

    Lively, erudite, page turning, and irresistible, Metropolis is a grand tour of human achievement.”

    Google Drive Logo DRIVE
    Book 1

    Holy Orders (Quirke, #6)

    ★★★★★

    Benjamin Black

    Book 1

    Even the Dead (Quirke, #7)

    ★★★★★

    Benjamin Black

    Book 1

    The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America

    ★★★★★

    Christian Wolmar

    Book 1

    The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives

    ★★★★★

    Naoíse Mac Sweeney

    Book 1

    What a Wonderful World: One Man's Attempt to Explain the Big Stuff

    ★★★★★

    Marcus Chown

    Book 1

    The Age of Grievance

    ★★★★★

    Frank Bruni

    Book 1

    Short War

    ★★★★★

    Lily Meyer

    Book 1

    How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History

    ★★★★★

    Josephine Quinn

    Book 1

    Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

    ★★★★★

    Jeff Speck

    Book 1

    The Library: A Fragile History

    ★★★★★

    Andrew Pettegree

    Book 1

    Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947

    ★★★★★

    Norman Lebrecht

    Book 1

    Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World's Most Unusual Corners

    ★★★★★

    Travis Elborough

    Book 1

    The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

    ★★★★★

    Niall Ferguson