Amsterdam
A History of the World's Most Liberal City
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
'Standard kit for anyone visiting the city' Guardian
'Rich and eventful ... a book that easily fuses large cultural trends with intimately personal stories' New York Times
'The story of a great city that has shaped the soul of the world. Masterful reporting, vivid history' James Gleick
In this ever-surprising and effortlessly erudite portrait, Russell Shorto traces the idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam and examines its role as the fount of liberalism. Weaving in his own experiences of his adopted home, he delivers a delightful and intellectually engaging story of the city from the building of the first canals in the 1300s through the brutal struggle for Dutch independence and its golden age as the capital of a vast empire, to its complex present in which its cherished ideals are being questioned anew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shorto conjures the anything-goes spirit of contemporary Amsterdam, with its pot-smoking and red-light districts, from the city's fascinating past as a major port city. Amsterdam, to Shorto, was not only the first city in Europe to develop the cultural and political foundations of what we now call liberalism "a society focused on the concerns and comforts of individuals,... run by individuals acting together," and tolerant of "religion, ethnicity, or other differences" but also an exporter of these beliefs to the rest of Europe and the New World. Shorto composes biographical sketches of these originators (Rembrandt, Spinoza) and exporters (John Locke, the Dutch East India Company) as he guides readers on a narrative tour of Amsterdam's intellectual history, its rise from a sleepy site of religious pilgrimage to the center of a trading empire into the present. Shorto's examination of Dutch tolerance also focuses on its failures, including an examination of collaboration with Nazi occupiers during WWII, and its current struggle to integrate its "immigrant underclass" into a more egalitarian multicultural life. Shorto's brilliant follow-up to his previous book on Dutch Manhattan (The Island at the Center of the World) is an expertly told history of a city of new, shocking freedoms and the tough-minded people that developed them.
