Hidden Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the World's Great Metropolises; A Memoir of Urban Exploration
It’s easy to imagine people from many different fields of study picking up this book after reading its title. Throw in cover photos of lone nightwalkers—one perched on a suspension bridge overlooking skyscrapers, and another shining his headlamp down a long, fully cobblestoned tunnel—and what readers with interests in history, architecture, creative writing, or urban planning can resist? Sadly, it quickly dawns that this book is for a privileged group of hearty-partiers, mainly dudes who are often so totally gonna get busted if they don’t bail, dudes who fancy themselves as rightful rebels against wrongful restrictions. Unlike charmingly inept dissenters from, say, Edward Abbey, nothing endears or titillates here. When the author isn’t drunkenly using historic gargoyles as climbing holds, he is defining himself by purposefully urinating in a Paris street. The book is padded with museum-plaque data on various destinations, and the characters are so immature it sounds gratuitous when we learn one had cancer or that the author has ancestors from the Holocaust. --Dane Carr