Metropolis

Lorenz explores the past thousand years and highlights significant events in each century 'through the perspective of a city that helped to define an age' in this imaginative title. Beginning with 11th-century Jerusalem and ending with New York in the 20th century, he also interprets metropolitan life in its widest sense by including a 13th-century Mongol Tent City. The technique employed by Lorenz, one of America's foremost architectural illustrators, is a highly individual blend of text and richly coloured artwork encompassing bird's-eye view panoramic maps and vistas and incredibly detailed interior and exterior scenes. Sometimes, however, when the pages become too intricate, the outcome is decorative rather than informative, and this is not helped by the frequent page turning involved in order to decipher the key to all this meticulously executed activity. All in all, this is a book which may well find more favour with young artists than young historians.