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Four Lost Cities

A Secret History of the Urban Age

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In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners 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.

©2021 Annalee Newitz (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books Ancient Archaeology Civilization Earth Sciences Science Sociology Urban World Latin American Urban Nonfiction
All stars
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Not my usual sort of choice for non fiction but this was really enjoyable. The narrator has a slight nasal twang which got a bit wearing ( sorry ) but the subject was fascinating.

Very interesting

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The narrator sounds like a soft porn actress and at times the prose doesn’t do much better - a respected female archaeologist “removes a stray strand of hair from her face”. It gets 2 stars rather than for the selection of cities but that’s about anything good I can say about this book.

Absolutely awful!

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This is the whistle stop tour of the latest research in to how people lived in the fours cities and an argument the collapse theory is outdated.

Enjoyed it, narration was well done.

Whistle stop tour.

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