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3.5 

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

By Annalee Newitz
Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday

A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them.

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia.

Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

259 Reviews

3.5
Thinking Face“This is a really interesting book! I enjoyed learning more about current archeological practices. I liked how this book told the story of the normal people living in cities and the exploration of why people lived in cities and why they abandoned them. I enjoyed the very brief critique of Jared Diamond. I thought the takeaways for modern city life at the end were well done. I listened to this on audiobook.”

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