Amsterdam is not just any city. Despite its relative size it has stood
alongside its larger cousins - Paris, London, Berlin - and has
influenced the modern world to a degree that few other cities have.
Sweeping across the city's colourful thousand year history, Amsterdam
will bring the place to life: its sights and smells; its politics and
people. Concentrating on two significant periods - the late 1500s to the
mid 1600s and then from the Second World War to the present, Russell
Shorto's masterful biography looks at Amsterdam's central
preoccupations. Just as fin-de-siecle Vienna was the birthplace of
psychoanalysis, seventeenth century Amsterdam was the wellspring of
liberalism, and today it is still a city that takes individual freedom
very seriously. A wonderfully evocative book that takes Amsterdam's
dramatic past and present and populates it with a whole host of
colourful characters, Amsterdam is the definitive book on this great
city.
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