The City in History, a magnificent and vitally important book by the master of urban culture, opens with a city that was a world and closes with a world that, potentially, has become a city. It re-interprets the origins of the city on the basis of newly discovered evidence about paleolithic man, and moves through succeeding urban cultures - Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, the medieval cities and monasteries, the rising industrial centres, down to the tumultuous modern period of nuclear power. More than a history of the forms and functions of the city throughout the ages, this is a bold and imaginative portrait of the development of man as a religious, a political, an economic, a cultural, and a sexual being. It is an engrossing story of the past and the troubled present, but also a prophecy for the future - of the city and of human civilization, threatened today with wholesale destruction from both within and without. Mumford sees beyond danger to hope, for new creative forces and new institutions may transform the form and function of the city, and with it, man...