Left Coast Justin's Reviews > Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Newitz is a professional journalist, best known for their work at technology blog Gizmodo, so I was intrigued when I saw they'd taken on an examination of four now-extinct cities. Ankor Wat and Pompeii are well known. A 9000-year-old Turkish settlement called Catalyhoyuk and a Native American settlement near present-day St. Louis called (or, as they points out, misnamed) Corokia are probably unknown to most readers.

They spent seven years researching and writing this book, and it's clearly a labor of love, as they get to know many experts in archaeology and accompanies them to activities off-limits to the general public. If there's an overarching theme to this book, it's that cities tend not to die all at once, but rather gradually become depopulated as the working classes that maintain the city find less and less reward to putting up with the stress of living there. Sound familiar?

There are exceptions to this (which Newitz doesn't mention): Warriors such as Genghis Khan were fond of completely depopulating cities in a matter of days. Pompeii, of course, was completely wiped out within a day, but they says that doesn't count because 90% of the people fled and then started over again a short distance away. I don't know if I agree that this means the city survived, though -- it just means the survivors survived.

This read like an academic dissertation, without all the jargon. They lay out an introduction, reviews the literature and shows how the idea that cities are depopulated by climate change and political destabilization is supported by old texts and interviews with archeologists. In the concluding chapter, they point out that -- hold on to your hats -- we live in an era of climate change and destabilitization ourselves! Whoah, didn't see that coming!

I learned a lot, but didn't necessarily have a lot of fun doing it.