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This book is a great resource for both beginning and experienced writers. While there are many books on the craft of writing, what makes Rahmey’s book stand out is his focus on making your story grip readers and compel us to read on.

On his blog, Flogging the Quill, Rhamey regularly presents the first page of a work in progress that has been submitted to the blog. He invites readers to vote on whether they would continue reading (yes/no/maybe). Then he gives his own vote and his rationale. Not only does this provide valuable feedback to the author of the page, but all writers can learn a lot from reading and voting and perusing Rhamey's responses.

This new craft book is a boon to writers. It contains specific explanations and tips for writers, all delivered in an easygoing style that makes the medicine go down easily. Rhamey, whom I met at a recent writer's conference, includes copious examples and quotes from other writing gurus. He even inserts a few cartoons to keep things lively.

Underlying Rhamey's specific advice for creating an irresistible story is a principle he calls writing for effect.

In storytelling, you’re not writing to inform the reader—you deliver information, of course, but that's not the purpose—you're writing to affect the reader. To craft narrative that creates an effect in the reader's mind—the experience of the story.

Rhamey offers sections that range from the big picture, such as how to how to create complex characters, to the smallest, such as the section on wordcraft where he demonstrates how certain words can weaken the story. He describes techniques for storytelling, description and dialogue, providing multiple examples for illustration. I especially like his description of how to handle transitions and flashbacks. These are often stumbling blocks for even experienced writers.

Best of all, there are exercises at the end where you can test your chops against some of the first pages submitted to his blog and then see what he has to say about them.

For me, the most effective use of this book is during the revision stage. It's easy for me to get hung up on revising the first chapter over and over. To do this kind of critiquing, I have to switch from my creative brain to a more analytical mindset, which is better done after I've finished a first draft. However, others may find it useful to read while still planning their opus, especially the sections on crafting characters and choosing a point of view.

I recommend this book to writers who want to keep their readers turning page after page, compelled by the story to go on.

If you want to submit your first page to Rhamey’s blog, see the directions on his website. He also provides a first page checklist, excerpted from this book, and suggests that you evaluate your first page against it before submitting.

Writers: what craft book have you found most helpful?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a digital copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

No, not that Robert B. Parker. This isn’t a Spenser novel. This Robert B. Parker—no relation—was a foreign correspondent who was on the ground in countries such as Germany, Hungary, Turkey and Spain for many of the early 20th century’s key events. He found time to write a number of suspenseful spy novels full of the insider knowledge acquired through his journalistic travels.

This 1951 thriller starts on the Orient Express between Vienna and Budapest. In order to get into Russian-occupied Hungary, John Stodder had bought a false passport in Vienna. He couldn’t travel under his own name; the Russians had refused him access because of uncomplimentary articles he’d written. He wasn’t after a story, at least not one for the paper. He wanted to find out what had happened to his brother during the war.

The only problem is that his passport belongs to a dead man, Marcel Blaye, who had been murdered only the previous day. He discovers this when Blaye’s beautiful and terrified assistant enters his compartment where she had been booked to travel with her employer. The man Blaye told her wanted to kill him lurked in the corridor outside.

The non-stop action begins, as Stodder realises that his passport won’t work at the border where they will be looking for Blaye’s murderer. The chase is on, as Stodder and Maria try to elude, not just the man in the corridor, but Russian soldiers and a mysterious Polish countess. They also have to decide what to do about Blaye’s mission and find the truth about Stodder’s brother.

What makes this story stand out are the details about places and politics. It’s an exciting story, with all kinds of twists and turns. Like an Alfred Hitchcock film, we have an ordinary man finding himself suddenly in extraordinary and dangerous circumstances. I never tire of the courage and resourcefulness the most ordinary person can display when neeeded.

Some fellow writers and I were discussing whether books could have too much suspense. Most of us agreed that the pacing had to vary, as it does here with moments of regrouping and recuperation. They don’t last long, but they help maintain the interest. We also liked some comic relief, here provided by the most unlikely pair of U.S. spies you can imagine. Plus there’s a nightclub where the dance floor rotates and booths drop to the basement and rise again at the touch of a button.

If you miss the spy novels of the 1950s, pick up this one, newly reissued by Hard Case Crime. It won’t disappoint. Then if you want, you can pick up a Spenser novel and leave the bitterly cold world of spies for the mysteries of Boston.

What spy novels have you enjoyed?

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. These are the ten best books I read in 2014. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of each book.

1. The Empty Family, by Colm Tóibín

Tóibín has long been one of my favorite authors. This collection of short stories only confirms my appreciation of his work. There are silences at the heart of many of the stories in this collection. I think about what is not said, what core of emotional truth becomes the secret spring for a story. By the end I felt as though I’d lived an additional nine lives.

2. The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald

I’d been meaning to read this book for some time. It’s ostensibly a travel memoir, a record of a walking tour of Suffolk, on the east coast of England that Sebald took in August, 1992, yet he moves through history, literature, and philosophy. He infuses his stories of what has been lost or forgotten with plenty of drama. This is a book I will long treasure and return to.

3. Andrew Wyeth, Looking Out, Looking In

I loved this exhibit at the National Gallery, but I also loved the essays in this catalogue by Nancy K. Anderson and Charles Brock. I’ve longed been fascinated by thresholds and other liminal spaces, but had never really thought about windows before. These essays deepened my thinking and pushed it in new directions.

4. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke

This novel by one of my favorite poets plunges the reader deep into the mind of a troubled young man, seducing us with poetic prose that draws us in ever deeper. Twenty-eight-year-old Malte leads a solitary life in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. He walks the streets, dismayed by the poverty and despair of the people he sees. Death is all around him: a man dying near him in a cafe, a young girl dying in front of his eyes on a trolley. He says, “I have no roof over me, and it is raining into my eyes.”

5. The Stone Carvers, by Jane Urquhart

Urquhart is one of my favorite writers, and this is one of her best books. I find it hard to summarize because of its complexity, though it reads like a dream. It’s about people with big dreams: to build a huge stone church with a bell in remote pioneer settlement in Ontario, to build a huge monument to the Canadian dead at Vimy Ridge. It’s about people with small dreams: to marry and create a home, to find the next meal, to preserve the names of the dead.

6. World Within World, by Stephen Spender

This autobiography by the well-known British poet has been called “the best autobiography in English written in the twentieth century.” The appeal of this book lies in his openness. Spender gives us simultaneously the story of his emotional, intellectual, political and poetic journeys during the years 1928-1939. He brings out the inner and outer conflicts of his time, as he pursues his goals first of trying to discover his real self and then to find a right relation to the world.

7. Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times, by Jennifer Worth

I’ve greatly enjoyed this series on PBS, but this book (the first of three) is even better than the show. In the early 1950s Worth, then Jennifer Lee, having trained as a nurse, was placed at an Anglican community of nuns to learn midwifery. Together with the nuns and two other young midwives-in-training, Worth serves the vibrant but shockingly poor Cockney East-Enders, as a midwife but also on occasion as a district nurse. Her stories of her fellow midwives and the characters she meets are funny and sad and enchanting.

8. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li’s short stories bring to life a world of people far removed from the headlines and stereotypes. Some are set in China and some in the U.S., but most include or reference the tension of sons, daughters, or fiancés who have gone to the U.S. to study and may or may not return. All are told in the voice of a storyteller, one who gives us an entrée into the lives of ordinary people with astonishing stories to tell. I love the way Li uses subtle turns of phrase, as well as proverbs, aphorisms, and references to mythology to convey the flavor of Chinese dialogue.

9. The Weight of a Human Heart, by Ryan O’Neill

Nearly all of the stories in this collection have some kind of experimental format: one is a series of figures; another a list of rules for writing a short story; yet another an examination paper. Some, such as the one told by labeling the components of a short story, probably appeal most to other writers. However, they are clever and surprisingly effective.

10. Myth of the Welfare Queen, by David Zucchino

Zucchino is a journalist who in this extremely well written book sets out to explode the stereotype of the welfare queen by introducing us to two remarkable women. Although the story takes place 15 years after I went off of welfare, there is much that I recognise. The truly sad part of the book is that Zucchino's portrait of the two women is just before Clinton signed the welfare reform act in 1996 that effectively removed the safety net. So as hard as the lives are of those portrayed in this book, we know they are about to get a lot harder.

What were the best books you read last year?

One of the advantages of a faltering memory is that I can reread mysteries feeling just as much suspense as the first time around. This 2002 book starts with Lippman’s sleuth, Tess Monaghan, pulling a caper with her preppy terrorist friend.

Whitney isn’t really a terrorist, but she’s pretty scary. Combining a sense of entitlement with a willingness to kick butt in a good cause, she may be my favorite character in the Tess novels. Here, she and Tess are out to, er, discourage a pedophile who made the mistake of preying on Whitney’s underage cousin. They get a bit carried away, ending up with Tess, who hid Whitney’s involvement, in court-ordered therapy.

Penitent and grateful, Whitney recommends Tess’s services to a group pushing domestic violence legislation. The task is to investigate five unsolved homicides that appear to be the result of domestic violence, in the hope of showing that stronger legislation is needed. Unfortunately, and much to Tess’s dismay, one member of the group is wealthy Luisa O’Neal, with whom Tess tangled in an earlier book. Interspersed with Tess’s investigation are brief chapters giving us the thoughts of someone who is following Tess and appears to be obsessed with her.

As always, Lippman superbly manages the threads of the five homicides, Luisa O’Neal, and the predator following Tess. There are enough subtle reminders to enable the reader to keep the different characters straight, even as we, along with Tess, are led into a more and more complex maze.

As so often with mysteries—and an aspect I love—this story shows how the present has been molded by the past. Each character bears the fingerprints of his or her experiences. Another aspect I love is the chance to inhabit other lives; for me here it is the lives of watermen and women on the small, disappearing islands in the Chesapeake Bay.

But what I appreciate most about Lippman’s books are the endings. So many otherwise excellent books trail off or stop abruptly, as though the author got tired of writing. There is no deus ex machina here, no dangling threads, only the conclusions that the story’s characters and events make inevitable.

In a series such as this, we have the comfort of familiar characters such as Tess and Whitney along with the chance to see more deeply into them with each installment. Watching Tess joust with her therapist in this book made me see another side to her. It’s been four years since the last Tess Monaghan book. A new one, Hush Hush, comes out next month. Much as I enjoy Lippman’s standalone novels, I’m eager to delve into Tess’s new adventures.

What’s your favorite book by Laura Lippman?

This is not the sort of book I usually read. The hint of anything paranormal is enough to make me abandon almost any book. However, the holiday season with its memories of childhood sent me back to the sort of Young Adult books I loved back then: stories of ordinary kids stumbling across a bit of magic.

Blue Sargent has her hands full with school, waitressing at Milo’s pizza place, walking dogs, tutoring children, and various other activities. You might think her an ordinary teen if it weren’t for her mother and the other women—aunt, cousin, friends—who sometimes or mostly live in the house at 300 Fox Way, all of them psychics, true ones, though as Blue’s mother says, “‘accurate but not specific'”. However, Maura and her fellow psychics have no trouble being specific about Blue’s future: if she kisses her true love, he will die.

True love hasn’t been on the menu for Blue, and certainly not with the boys from the local prep school, Aglionby, whom she calls raven boys for the school patch on their jackets featuring a raven. When four of them show up at Milo’s and one who displays the slick grace of a president asks if she would come talk to his friend who thinks she’s cute, Blue responds with disdain.

When not in class or eating pizza, the four boys are consumed by a quest. It’s really the President’s quest but he has fired the imagination of his three friends and they willingly take on the tasks he assigns them. They want to map the ley line—one of the ancient lines of power that hippies and New Agers have been scouting for decades—that runs through this town of Henrietta, Virginia, and to discover and rouse what they think is buried there.

I found the writing extraordinary. The teens, Blue and the four boys, are vividly drawn, genuine in their actions, words and environments. Their seemingly ordinary teen-ness gives way to a deeper understanding of the way in which each is damaged, details that are fed out slowly throughout the story. And Stiefvater slips in bits of characterisation that bring them into focus. For example one of the boys is messing about with wood, and is asked what his plan is.

Ronan smiled his lizard smile. “Ramp. BMW. The goddamn moon.”

This was so like Ronan. His room inside Monmouth was filled with expensive toys, but, like a spoiled child, he ended up playing outside with sticks.

Of course, this is only one of the many facets of Ronan.

Cryptic predictions and comments by Blue’s mother and her cohorts combined with the triteness of everyday life often make scenes at home hilarious. For instance, one of them asks for grape juice to pour into a bowl to see the future. Blue holds up a jug of Cran-Grape. “‘That will work fine,'” the seer says. However, it is a death she wants to see, and the scene effortlessly shifts from silly to serious.

That is one of the great strengths of this book: the way scenes hold a range of emotions and move between them so naturally that it is only looking back that I can marvel at the tiny turning points. Often in manuscripts I see single emotions: this is the scene where he is angry; this is the one where he is tender. But we are more complex than that. We can experience a dozen emotions just walking from one room into another.

Another great strength is what Donald Maass, literary agent and author, in his recent book, Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling, calls micro-tension. These are the questions and conflicts that make us keep reading page after page, long after we should have turned out the light.

Stiefvater does this in many ways, one of which is with slight asides that create a little question in the reader’s mind. For example, in a conversation between Blue and one of her mother’s friends: “‘And you have plenty of time to grow into your own intuitive talents,’ Neeve added. Her gaze seemed hungry.” Why hungry? I must read on! Of course, it’s important not to do this too often, and Stiefvater uses it sparingly.

Her dialogue also keeps the reader alert. Her characters often don’t respond directly to what’s been said, and even when they do it can create that little tension-producing gap. Here’s Blue talking with Gansey, the President boy, about her talent for enhancing other people’s psychic ability:

“Yes,” she said, “I guess I make things that need energy stronger. I’m like a walking battery.”
“You’re the table everyone wants at Starbucks,” Gansey mused as he began to walk again.
Blue blinked, “What?”
Over his shoulder, Gansey said, “Next to the wall plug.”

The one fault in the book is the ending. Like so many books these days, it just falls off after a climactic scene, as though the author got tired of writing, leaving many story questions unanswered. Of course, this is the first in a projected four-book series (three published so far), so perhaps the dangling threads are meant to make us read the next book. However, that seems like a cheap trick from such an accomplished author.

What makes you keep reading?

My expectations for this year have all been overturned. I was certain that I knew what the shape of this year would be, this changed life. But my ideas were replaced by new, maybe better dreams and plenty. Thes are the songs that kept me company. Many thanks to my friends for their music.

These Days, Tom Rush
Urge For Going, Tom Rush
Time Has Told Me, Nick Drake
Blue Moon With Heartache, Rosanne Cash
Open Road , Michael G. Ronstadt
Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes, Paul Simon
Harvest Tune, Mike Marshall & Chris Thile
J.S. Bach: The Goldberg Variations, No. 1, Mike Marshall & Chris Thile
Arctic Air, Malmö Academic Choir & Orchestra
Underbar En Stjärna Blid, Malmö Academic Choir & Orchestra
Gift Horse / Over The Water, Craig Taborn
There's The Day, Cathal McConnell
No Money, Ben Moss & Laurel Swift
It's Alright, Precious Bryant
Rise Up, 3rd String Trio
Cinecitta, 3rd String Trio
Ah, Mari, 3rd String Trio
Vent D'Automne, 3rd String Trio
The Introduction (Carolan's Cottage), Daron Douglas And Karen Axelrod
Miss Thornton's / Mason's Apron, The Latter Day Lizards
Arran Boat/Paddy Fahey's/Devlin's/Bagdad Bully, Alexander Mitchell
Candles In The Dark, Alexander Mitchell
Seamus O'Brien, The Latter Day Lizards
Bright Morning Stars are Rising, Jacqueline Schwab
The Dreamer, Tom Rush

What have you been listening to?

A few weeks ago my son mentioned that new medical research may well extend our lives significantly, even for those of us alive today. So when I saw a recommendation for this book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Beak of the Finch, I jumped on it. I was prepared for some heavy reading but in fact the book flew by, the science delivered in small, easily digestible bites. Weiner has an outstanding ability to describe the particulars of the research being done such that a layman can easily follow it.

To my amazement, that research promises more than just many of us being able to live to 100. It may enable us, basically, to live forever. And not just as withered, decrepit shells, but with the health of our prime.

Of course, my immediate thought was a cynical conviction that these benefits would be monetized like everything else, so only the rich would live forever while we peasants would serve and die. I wondered if immortality was such a good thing: Strom Thurmond would have been a Senator until the end of time.

Luckily, Weiner doesn't avoid the tough questions. He brings in philosophy, art and literature. He looks at the big questions. Would such longevity bring massive overcrowding or would people have even fewer children or none? Societies whose life spans have increased dramatically in the last 60 years have also experienced dramatic declines in birthrates. He asks if we would become bored, if life would lose its meaning. He quotes moral philosopher Bernard Williams from The Makropulos Case where he argues that: “Immortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless …so, in a sense, death gives the meaning to life.”

Weiner asks what immortality would do to our sense of time:

Mortality is the central fact of our lives . . . We try to number our days, so that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom, as we are advised in the Psalms. And it is essential to us at any age to know or to guess roughly where we are in our time—because that knowledge does teach us how to live.

Our ability to exist in time may require our being mortal, although we can’t understand that any more than the fish can understand water. What we call the stream of consciousness may depend upon mortality in ways that we can hardly glimpse.

Even more interesting for me as a writer, he considers our universal metaphor of life as a journey. All stories are about journeys. We writers work hard at learning how to structure stories to be meaningful and interesting. One thing we know for sure is what Aristotle said: all stories have a beginning, middle and end. But what if they don't? How do we then understand the shape of our lives?

We are performers of the self, we are playwrights of our lives, and we need death to bring down the curtain, or the play will go on too long; the story will lose all shape and cease to be a story at all.

Weiner gives us not just the science behind today's search for immortality, but also some of the people behind it. These lively conversations and descriptions help to make the book even more readable. There's a lot here to think about, questions that go to the heart of what it means to be human. The book came out in 2010, leaving me eager to find out what new research has happened since then. I'm still not at all convinced that hugely increased longevity is a good thing, but I want to know more about it.

If you could stay healthy, would you want to live to 100? How about 500? A thousand?

I’ve greatly enjoyed this series on PBS, but hadn’t thought about reading the books upon which they are based until my friend, Cynthia, advised me that they were even better than the show. I usually assume books to be much better than their film incarnations, if only because films must condense the story and often lose much of the subtlety and shading. However, in this case the films are so good that I couldn’t believe the books could be better. I was wrong.

In the early 1950s Worth, then Jennifer Lee, having trained as a nurse, was placed at an Anglican community of nuns to learn midwifery. The nuns belong to an order, which she calls St Raymund Nonnatus and their convent, Nonnatus House, in located in Poplar, a neighborhood in London’s East End. Together with the nuns and two other young midwives-in-training, Worth serves the vibrant but shockingly poor Cockney East-Enders, as a midwife but also on occasion as a district nurse.

Her stories of her fellow midwives and the characters she meets are funny and sad and enchanting. English has been known to treasure its eccentrics, but never did I imagine so many crowded into one small book. Worth gives them in all their glory, showing their faults and remarkable strengths, always describing them and their antics with dignity and respect.

I had not realised conditions were so bad in the East End during the 1950s. I knew that England, still recovering from the Second World War, struggled to find food and housing for its battered population, but I didn’t know that condemned tenements lingered on for decades due to the lack of alternate housing. Some of these densely populated tenements blocks only provided a single cold-water tap and lavatory for each level of flats. What with the docks and the railway terminus, the already-overcrowded East End had been targeted during the Blitz, leaving many to live in bombed-out buildings even during this period.

When I think of the prosperity I grew up in here in the U.S., I can now understand why my mother continued to send food parcels to her English friends throughout the 1950s. At the time, it didn’t make sense to me, conditioned as I was by my reading to think of England as a “green and pleasant land”.

When I teach memoir writing, I encourage writers to find the balance of narration and dramatic scenes that best serves their story. Worth succeeds brilliantly at this. She gives us just enough narration to understand the social (and sometimes political) context and then jumps right into the action. Each chapter is devoted to a different person, either a colleague or patient, except for a few instances when one or two more chapters are needed to finish the story. While it may seem organised like a picaresque novel, just a sequence of episodes, there is a narrative arc, which only becomes clear when you look at the book as a whole, culminating in Worth herself being profoundly changed.

The chapters fly by, so entertaining and assured is Worth’s voice. These vivid characters will stay with you. Worth wrote the book, she said, to capture a way of life that disappeared during the slum clearances of the 1960s. There is still poverty but no longer is it quite so dire. I ponder, however, the ways that the vibrant working class life she describes has changed. I of all people will not romanticise poverty, yet must allow that when I lived in neighborhoods of working class families and those on public assistance, I found much that was preferable to the prosperous neighborhood where I grew up.

What novels or memoirs have you read that have vivid characters, people whom you can’t forget?

This book left me reeling. Ramsey’s poems of love and anger and redemption explode from the page. Full of outrage, raw hurt and tender caresses, they command the reader’s attention and emotion.

Some poems are not as strong as others, but what fascinates me is the way they gather force as the book continues. In the middle sections, Ramsey takes on various personas—someone dying of AIDS, someone on death row—to explore even more intense experiences. And the poems in the last section are simply spectacular. Reading the book is like watching a poet find her voice.

I have heard Ramsey perform, so could hear her voice as I read and reread her words. Since we are friends, you may be right in suspecting that I am biased, but check this out:

Colors

I am not black, brown, white, grey or yellow
I am flesh. Red blood simmering,
White bone floating on a smoky stoned cloud.

I don’t belong here
Earth is no home
My mood matches mother moon.

A dark day equals this stormy night’s bruise.
I am not black, brown, white, grey or yellow,
I am life. Acceptance is my hue.

Or this excerpt from “2008”:

Updating my resume with poetic rhetoric, I petition for the creation of a White House Jester position.
License and paycheck will allow me to tell how it really is
Instead of recycling nifty 5 o’clock catch phrases.

Pondering, penning, sketching and spilling
Bloody messages from a war torn group that will be refuted by the faint of heart and some historians in part, while
sprinkling our food for thought with philosophically salted excesses
hoping to form opinions from the hardening of arterial stresses.

Ramsey’s courage and honesty jump from every page. She is not afraid to take on the most controversial issues: abortion, homosexuality, incest, abuse. Nor does she hesitate to draw us in to the most personal moments. I’ve sometimes found that spoken word poems lose some of their force when deprived of the poet’s performance. However, the poems in this collection, especially those in the final section, retain their passion. Ramsey invites us to experience the world fully, its joys and sorrows, and to rail with her against injustice.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a digital copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

In this fascinating and readable book, Daniel Brook explores four cities—St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai—that were purposely built as gateways to the world. They do not seem to belong where they are located, but instead ignore native culture and become cities that could be located anywhere. Brook’s focus on their architecture brings this element to the fore: a room copied from the Vatican in St. Petersburg’s royal palace, Art Deco hotels in Shanghai that look like Manhattan, a university in Mumbai cribbed from Oxford, Dubai’s double Chrysler buildings. But what they really have in common is their purpose: to embody the future.

The four cities he chooses to discuss play a similar role in each of their countries: they were created to import and embody modernity. Architects and scientists from more modern—that is, Western—nations were brought in to create a city that would carry no hint of local traditions, but instead resemble and compete with the major cities of the Western world. The intent was not to create a slavish imitation, but to provide a window to the outside world and begin the task of dragging an isolated culture still set in ancient ways into the modern age.

Indeed, each of the four cities becomes an incubator for change, though not always the change originally intended. Rulers hoped to import scientific, artistic, and business knowledge without importing modern ideas about freedom and democracy.

Entranced by Amsterdam’s technical advancements and domination of world trade at the end of the 17th century, Peter the Great created St. Petersburg from scratch on a marsh far from Moscow. He expected that the architects and scientists and artists whom he brought in would inspire his people to learn new ways and prepare to compete in the modern world. That happened in St. Petersburg itself, but did not spread to the rest of the country, creating friction and unrest. Once the home of the new, the city was quickly pushed out of favor after Peter’s death. We follow St. Petersburg through its turbulent history (and name changes), the city’s story helping us to see Russia’s familiar evolution from serfdom to revolution to the Putin era in a new light.

Similarly, Shanghai was China’s window to the world in the mid-19th century. After losing the Opium War, China found itself forced to allow the Western powers do whatever they wanted. And what they did was create a modern city with abundant appurtenances, but these were only available to Westerners. Again we come to a new understanding of China’s changes through the story of Shanghai’s evolution.

Mumbai (then Bombay) also was built up and run by the British. Yet by attracting and training natives to the point where they felt adequate to take over, the Raj helped to create its own demise. Now a city of “slumdogs and millionaires”, Mumbai hovers on the brink of change. The 2011 census shocked Mumbai by showing that its population is in decline. Yet its tremendous wealth could be used to achieve the greatness of its promise.

The most recent city to be examined is Dubai. Centrally located for trade it languished until the 1970s when a forward-looking Sheikh Rashid armed with oil money and air conditioning set out to create a modern city. The story of how he and his son Sheikh Mohammed succeeded is a fascinating one.

Used to the idea of cities growing slowly over the centuries, I had not realised before that these four cities were conceived and created so quickly. Nor that they were envisioned to be a threshold between a country isolated in the past and the modern world. The plan to confine within a city’s limits such modern ideas as free speech and general suffrage seem in hindsight obviously doomed. Authoritarian governments may think that they can contain change, but may find that a little change can lead to a revolution no one expected.

This thoughtful book recognises the great cost of creating these cities. The peasants who actually built the first three perished in scores, being considered expendable in pursuit of the ruler's dream, while Dubai's imported labor doesn't fare much better.

I highly recommend this fascinating view of history through the fates of these four cities. As Brook says, “They are places to be reckoned with because they are ideas as much as cities, metaphors in stone and steel for the explicit goal of Westernization.” Seeing how utopian dreams play out fascinates me, but here those dreams affected whole countries and empires.

Have you ever been to a city that did not seem to belong in the country where it was located?