Cities (Monica L. Smith)

Cities: The First 6,000 Years
Monica L. Smith
Viking
Nonfiction, Cultures/Geography/History
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Few things exemplify modern life quite like a city, but even the newest, brightest, most advanced city can trace the roots of nearly everything that keeps it running back to the very beginning, to the first (known) cities in the Middle East, in Asia, in Central and South America even. Archaeologist Monica L. Smith takes a look at what prompts humans to develop urban lifestyles, so very different from our long evolutionary history of hunting and gathering and even agricultural village existence, and how many innovations and technologies go into making them survive and thrive, sometimes outlasting the cultures that founded them.

REVIEW: I was looking for something different for the day's audiobook selection at work, so I hit the Random function on Libby and scrolled until something looked vaguely interesting. I've played a few city builder games in my time, and many of my favorite books involve cities past, present, future, and imagined, so I decided to give this one a try.
As promised, it's a nice introduction to the subject, outlining what defines a city, how similar they often are even across vast geographic and cultural (and temporal) distances, and why it's highly unlikely (save massive population and/or climate collapse) that we'll ever abandon the idea altogether; they seem to take on lives of their own, once founded, and even when cities are abandoned the survivors tend to be absorbed by other cities. She views cities as an inevitable outgrowth of our species's inherent tendencies toward innovation and cooperative ventures, and the massive efforts that we're apparently willing to undertake to keep them running seem to argue in favor of their benefits outweighing their costs. Smith doesn't just draw from the "usual suspects" of Middle Eastern and European examples, citing cities around the globe that all ultimately have quite a lot in common, enough that distant explorers could, with minimal trial and error, generally navigate city life and recognize the basics of organization no matter where they traveled. Of course, there are some drawbacks to cities and city life, but Smith focuses more on the benefits, and the innovations that go into overcoming the drawbacks (while acknowledging that some, such as inequalities in opportunity and quality of life, seem to be persistent bugs). She even praises "conspicuous consumption", particularly in the middle class, as part of what makes cities so great. (I'm not entirely sure that an argument that boils roughly down to "we've always had conspicuous consumption and massive waste so we shouldn't be worried about continuing the trend" is a completely convincing argument in its favor, especially as we're staring down increasing scarcity and the unprecedented disruptions of catastrophic climate change that are no longer just over the horizon but standing right outside the metaphoric city gates, but I'm not the archaeologist...)
It's a book aimed at us undereducated lay readers, so it's not an in-depth examination (which would take far, far more than one book to tackle anyway), but it's still an intriguing look at a feature of civilization that many of us take for granted, and how far back "modern" city features like fast food and night life and middle management bureaucracies can be traced in the archaeological record.
On a closing note, one downside: it does fire up the ol' itch to replay my classic city builder games... I was so, so close to reaching the rank of pharaoh in Pharaoh/Cleopatra, and I was just about getting the hang of Children of the Nile...

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The Lost City of the Monkey God (Douglas Preston)

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story
Douglas Preston
Grand Central Publishing
Nonfiction, Cultures/History/True Stories
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Since the days of Cortes, when conquerors came to the New World with dreams of riches and empires and first set eyes on the alien-seeming cultures of Central and South America, stories have trickled back to Western civilization about lost cities, from the well-known tale of El Dorado to the mystery of Machu Picchu. Among these were enigmatic references to a white-walled city deep in the forbidding mountains and rain forests of what is now Honduras, glimpsed now and again by the odd traveler and referred to in numerous local stories. For a long time, these were dismissed as the tall tales of travelers, or possibly wishful thinking and mistaken identity, but in every generation were adventurers and believers who risked everything in the search. In this book, writer Douglas Preston relates the history and prehistory of the American civilizations and the search for the so-called "lost city of the monkey god"... and his own involvement in the expedition that finally unearthed the possible truth behind the legend, a truth grander and more unbelievable than any tall tale.

REVIEW: Sometimes truth really does seem stranger than fiction. Here, Preston relates the story of a groundbreaking expedition deep into one of the few pristine wildernesses left in the world, in pursuit of a mystery that many experts had long dismissed as mere fancy but which turns out to have some basis in reality after all (no spoiler for saying they actually do find something - more than just one thing, actually). From the perils of snakes and ants and disease to the unfathomable difficulty of even getting around in the rain forest, plus the perils of politics in perhaps one of the most volatile regions of the Americas (and the related politics of archaeology in general), it seems utterly incredible that not only did the explorers survive, but accomplished so much. Along the way, Preston discusses the history and prehistory of the region and the search, the allure and romance of "lost cities" in the Western world (and how the notions are inextricably tied with colonialism and a sense of cultural superiority, the "right" to claim and plunder whatever one sets one's eyes upon regardless of whose property, or story, it truly is), even how expeditions like the one he becomes involved with play into national and international politics. The people involved sometimes seem larger than life, and the search takes twists and turns aplenty as it wends through history and various obstacles and setbacks, not to mention the fallout of success. Along the way, the grandeur and dangerous beauty of the remote Honduras wilderness comes to life, as well as the awe-inspiring accomplishments of the city's builders and the incalculable tragedy of their collapse. The chapters on the unimaginably devastating effects of European diseases on the Americas and the risks of disease today (as the author and other expedition members discover the hard way) take on new significance after the height of the recent pandemic that shows how vulnerable even our "superior" global civilization is to illness, and how (to be blunt) screwed we're going to be if we don't take the lessons of the past - distant and recent - seriously as the changing climate allows "exotic" tropical illnesses and parasites to spread to new populations. Once in a while the names can run together a bit, but overall this is an interesting account of an incredible find and its impact on the explorers involved, expanding our understanding of a fascinating region and period of history.

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