Cosmopolitan Culture: The Gilt-Edged Dream of a Tolerant City

By Bonnie Menes Kahn

Book Overview

From Simon & Schuster, Cosmopolitan Culture is Bonnie Menes Kahn's exploration of the gilt-edged dream of a tolerant city. "The author attempts to identify common features of great cities, past and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689118457
• ISBN13: 9780689118456
• Release Date: December 1987
• Publisher: Scribner
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.68 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Excellent book!

It's unfortunate Macmillan treated this stimulating and highly readable book so poorly with bad proofreading, a drab cover, and no index. Find it and read it anyway if you are at all interested in the development of Western cultures and civilizations.

What made Babylon, Vienna, and Harlem flourish?

This book looks at the way cultural diversity brought about great cultural developments in ancient Babylon, Constantinople, Freud's Vienna, the Harlem Renaissance. It asks the question,why did these civilizations flourish in the presence of diversity, while so many others have merely fought and obliterated each other?This book is written in a style that actively involves the reader. It is not a boring scholarly study, it's an original and stimulating book that should appeal to the sort of readers who like Charles Pellegrino. It's the kind of book that you talk about for hours with like-minded people; a book that finds you rediscovering your own world.I was particularly taken with the chapter on Babylon, as it throws much light on the cultural origins of much of the _resistance_ to diversity that is found in current Western civilization. If you get a kick out of finding out "the other side of the story" - say, history as the Babylonians might have written it if they'd been the ones that won the war - you'll love this chapter.A real treat for the mind. I'm sorry this book has gone out of print - it's as good today as it was in 1987. In fact, maybe it was just a little ahead of its time and it's time to bring it out again. It should have wide appeal.