[[Category:History|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|History]] __NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|title=The Last Days of Detroit: Motor Cars, Motown and the Collapse of an Industrial Giant
|author=Mark Binelli
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=Moving back to his native Detroit, Mark Binelli tries to see where it all went wrong for a city which was once ''America's capitalist dream town'' but has shrunk more significantly than anywhere else in the country over recent years. How did this happen, and what effect has it had on the residents there? Is the decline irreversible, or can those who want to bring about a changed and improved Detroit succeed?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099553880</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|title=Penny Loaves and Butter Cheap: Britain in 1846
|summary=It was in the eighteenth century that an area of London consisting of about half a square mile, from Soho and Leicester Square across Covent Garden’s Piazza to Drury Lane, and down from Long Acre to the Strand, with Covent Garden at the very centre, became what has in modern times been recognised as the world’s first creative ‘bohemia’. This was where the cream of Britain’s significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists of the age lived and worked, side by side with the city’s chief market traders, craftsmen, shopkeepers, rakes, pickpockets and prostitutes. One might say that all human life was here.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846146771</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|title=Inventing the Enemy: Essays on Everything
|author=Umberto Eco
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=Imagine a sumptuous Italian feast in the sunlit-bathed ancient countryside near Milan. Next to you a gentleman talks and eats with furious energy. He tells of Dante, Cicero, and St Augustine and quotes a multitude of obscure troubadours from the Middle Ages. He repeats himself, gestures flamboyantly, nudges you sharply in the ribs, belches and even breaks wind. His conversation contains nuggets of information but in the flow of his discourse there is a fondness for iteration and reiteration. He throws bones over his shoulder and when he reaches the cheese course - definitely too much information on the mouldy bacteria! When you finally get up things the elderly gentleman has said prompt your imagination. You are better informed, intrigued and prodded to examine his discourse again and again, even if only to challenge what you have heard. Such are the effects of reading Eco’s essays in ''Inventing the Enemy''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099553945</amazonuk>
}}