Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Bender (history, New York U.), in a series of 14 essays, explores issues of metropolitan culture as it developed in New York City. He discusses how places and built features of the city such as Washington Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the skyscraper reveal key transformations in the scale of metropolitan space and the character of culture. The social organization of metropolitan life is examined through explorations of art, intellectual pursuits, and public culture. Finally, the political history of cities and New York is discussed with reference to relations between cities and regions and the nature of cities in the era of globalization. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. vii)
• Introduction: The Unfinished Metropolis (p. ix)
• Part I Icons of Transformation (p. 1)
• 1. Washington Square in the Growing City (p. 3)
• 2. Brooklyn Bridge (p. 15)
• 3. Skyscraper and Skyline (p. 27)
• Part II Art, Intellect, and Public Culture (p. 55)
• 4. Public Culture and Metropolitan Modernity (p. 57)
• 5. Democracy and Cultural Authority (p. 69)
• 6. Metropolitanism and the Spirit of Invention (p. 81)
• 7. Modernist Aesthetics and Urban Politics (p. 101)
• 8. The Arts and the World of Intellect (p. 133)
• 9. The University and the City (p. 149)
• Part III Politics (p. 165)
• 10. Cities and American Political Culture (p. 167)
• 11. New York as a Center of Difference (p. 185)
• 12. Cities and Citizenship (p. 199)
• 13. The New Metropolitanism (p. 219)
• 14. Cities, Nations, and Globalization (p. 239)
• Credits (p. 255)
• Notes (p. 257)
• Index (p. 277)
• About the Author (p. 288)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Bender (history, New York Univ.; Rethinking American History in a Global Age) examines the political and cultural story of New York City from its creation as a Dutch trading post in the 16th century to its present status as a world-class metropolis. In Bender's account, the city seems "unfinished" when compared with such classic urban models as Paris or Vienna, but its comparative lack of physical and institutional completeness is also its strength: New York is famously a home of skyscrapers but "nonetheless prizes small brick and brownstone houses"; it is known for its midtown grid but also its grid-confounding "greensward" of Central Park. It is a center of money-making and reform. "There is not and there is not to be a final truth about itself," Bender observes. Not necessarily following the path of the European models, New York was unwilling to pursue any single line of development, whether in its physical shape or its social organization. As an icon of modernity, New York necessarily must always be changing, "re-inventing itself," and therefore incomplete. Unlike recent fuller histories such as Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace's Gotham, Bender's is a thematic history of the city that argues powerfully for the importance of the American urban ideal. The writing is dense but also inspired. Recommended for urban studies collections in academic libraries.-Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Book Review

Collection of distinct but companionable articles by Bender (Humanities/NYU) assessing New York City as a multiplicity of public places and institutions in flux and very much sui generis. New York, the author finds, sits outside the metropolitan idea. Unlike Paris or Vienna, it has not assumed national centrality and leadership in political and cultural matters; it doesn't realize and standardize the best hopes for the American polity. This, he figures, is because the city is continually in the making: unresolved, or resolved only temporarily. In its physical development and social organization it refuses a single logic, preferring a self-fashioned pluralism that is pragmatic, unpredictable, nonhierarchical. "The center has never held firmly in New York," Bender writes. "It has been continually undermined by fragmentation of the elite and by manifold rebellions." That has consequences for better and worse. Aspiringly democratic, polyvalent, and vibrant in architecture, politics, and art, the city is a place where, as Virgil Thomson observed, one group could argue "esthetics with intelligence and politics with a passion" while the other discussed "esthetics with passion and politics with intelligence." But New York lacks an image of itself as a collectivity; it has no representative institutions and lacks a civic culture in which "the public space is the terrain of the public as visual representation, while institutions provide a place for representative political deliberation." Bender (Intellect and Public Life, not reviewed, etc.) brings wide-ranging curiosity, literacy, and experience in urban matters to the question of New York, from the iconography of the Brooklyn Bridge and its role in urban reconfiguration to the dialectical relationship between the city's horizontal, civic impulses and its vertical, corporate ones. There are persistent issues, including the city's racial divisions, but "New York's character is to be incomplete." A meaty and satisfying look at a great city, its multiple environments, and their unending transformations. (b&w photos throughout)