The day Cityscapes arrived brought me back to the city of my childhood and of my family and closest friends. Page after page of wonderful photographs, of history remembered and learned yet again. So many places visited with my elementary school field trips and then revisited years later on my brief stays in New York. Cityscapes offers a visual feast as well as an intellectual journey to places and people seen years ago, but only now understood in historical context.

A month or so after I fell into Cityscapes, I was delighted to host a young couple from New York. They saw the book on my coffee table and picked it up. Hours later, the two of them were still pouring over the book, learning new and fascinating slices of urban life in their recently adopted city.

Just as New York offers something for everyone, Cityscapes brings light to the eyes of anyone who opens its cover and enters its world.

There is no place like New York, and there is no book about New York like this one. As revealing as the superb choice of photos, sketches and maps are, so is the narrative story linked with the visual: colonial seaport blossoming into a republican town, fragmented city becoming the immigrant metropolis, and finally the cosmopolitan community and global village we celebrate today. The authors have opened for us vista after vista and close-up after close-up of the poignancy and power of this magnificently restless, creative and changing Empire City.

The destruction of the World Trade Center has altered the New York City skyline forever and has forced people to confront a new image of New York. The next generation of New York observers will only know the Towers from their images - several magnificant ones appear in this book's final chapter.

Cityscapes is more than just a history of New York City and it is more than simply a book of beaufitul pictures. It is a unique social history that explores the timely question of how New York, the City, has been both constructed and reflected in images captured over four hundred years.

So far, this is my favorite book of New York City history.

You may find the prose a little bit too much like a Bible story, and the black and white moral clarity a little out of kilter with our present-day tendency to equivalency and pandering. But this book hits the mark in its ability to depict a great man triumphing after going through some really tough times. George Washinginton is the man, and the time is the summer and fall of 1776 - not a good stretch for the Revolution. Mr. Fast gives us an inside look at what Washington might have been thinking as he literally drags his army in retreat from one disaster after another, from Brooklyn Heights, to Manhattan, to New Jersey - with the British army and Hessian mercenaries breathing down his neck, soldiers deserting on a grand scale, fellow generals looking for ways to stab him in the back, and all the while not getting much support from the Continental Congress. The truthfulness of the portrait is striking, we see Washington is not necessarily the demi-God we have grown up to believe in, but a simple man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, grasping for a way out, as he watches his army disintegrating like "grains of sand falling through his hands." Fast also gives us facinating insights into characters, such as Nathan Hale, Gen. Henry Knox, Alexander Hamilton, and others. Mr. Fast wrote this historical novel in the early dark days of WWII to rally his countryman by illustrating that tough times weren't new to America. If you think you're having a bad day, or that you live in tough times, or that America is in a jam it can't get out of, this book is a jolt and a tonic. Washington retreated, but believed he would ultimately win. As the British, Japanese, and Germans learned - don't ever count us out.