P.D. Smith's Blog, page 4

Notebook on Cities and Culture

On a very wet day at the end of January, Colin Marshall interviewed me in a Winchester bar for his excellent series of podcasts, Notebook on Cities and Culture. We talked for about an hour about our experiences of cities from Tokyo to Munich, about the differences between cities, about how they are built and how we experience them, about the city of non-places and the city of crime, and many other subjects.

You can download the podcast now on Colin's website.

Reasons for writing

As an author, there is nothing better than finding an email like this in your inbox:

“I bought your book City a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. I am a high school teacher, specialising in geography and urban geography. I have been inspired by your book to re-create our rather tired urban geography unit, with a move away from a functional/chronological to a more narrative teaching approach. I am loosely basing the structure of the first 7-8 lessons on the chapters of your book with a view to both creating a deeper understanding of the urban environment as well as engaging and inspiring the students with stories about some amazing places - much the same as you do in your book.

Really, I guess I am writing this to thank you for inspiring me to try harder to inspire my kids.”

Neville Gibbs

Waitakere College, Auckland, New Zealand

Comments like that make all the hard work of writing and research worthwhile. Thanks Neville!

Dr Strangelove, Leo Szilard & the Doomsday Men: On the 50th Anniversary

It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the release of one of my favourite films – Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Described by the director as a satire about a ‘nuclear Wise Man’, it was co-written by Peter George, the British author of the 1958 novel on which the film is based, Red Alert, published under his pen name, Peter Bryant. In Britain the novel was called Two Hours to Doom.

Kubrick read George’s thriller in October 1961, the month Soviet scientists tested the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. On 30 October at 08.30 GMT, scientists in Europe detected what was described as ‘the biggest man-made explosion on record’. Newsweek described the superbomb as ‘Khrushchev’s monster’. On an aerial photo of Manhattan Island, the magazine mapped the extent of its awesome destructive power. The bomb had a yield of at least 50 megatons. It would blast a crater at least a mile wide and would level buildings up to ten miles from ground zero. New York with its proud skyscrapers would be reduced to a radioactive wasteland.

Later, scientists said that the Russians had modified the bomb for the test; if it was ever used in war it would explode with a force of 100 megatons. The Hiroshima bomb was a mere 12.5 kilotons. The Soviets nicknamed their superweapon the Tsar Bomba, ‘King of Bombs’. Andrei Sakharov, who designed it under direct orders from Khrushchev, called it simply the Big Bomb. The detonation of the Tsar Bomba made Kubrick even more determined to make a movie about nuclear war. He had become obsessed with the subject.

Kubrick and George’s film was well received when it was finally released in January 1964 – the press screening of Dr Strangelove was originally due to take place on 22 November 1963, the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. The New York Times panned the movie as a ‘shattering sick joke’. But Sight and Sound said it demonstrated how ‘power politics have become a Frankenstein monster which one little error can send out of control’. Their critic praised it as ‘the most hilariously funny and the most nightmarish film of the year’. For the New Statesman it was a ‘mesmeric’ film that set out ‘to create its own category or genre.’ Despite Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday Telegraph likening Kubrick’s portrayal of Americans to Soviet propaganda, the film was hugely popular with moviegoers who ‘ringed the block’ at the Columbia cinema in London. The cinema even had to put on special late screenings at 11 p.m. each night. Ticket sales were 25 per cent higher than for any other film the Columbia had shown, and The Times reported that ‘all house records have been broken’.

Of course, it is the figure of the mad scientist, Dr Strangelove, that has helped make the film so memorable. Peter Sellers succeeds wonderfully in fusing together the traits of the real-life, and indeed fictional, figures on which he is based. Through the alchemy of film-making, Kubrick and Sellers created cinematic gold in the figure of Dr Strangelove.

The so-called father of the H-Bomb Edward Teller, Hitler’s rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun and the hawkish, wheel-chair-bound mathematician John von Neumann were all key players in the sciences of destruction. The references to Peenemünde and the concentration camps in the film’s novelization make it abundantly clear that von Braun was Peter George’s main model for Dr Strangelove. However, his words are those of the man who had worked with and admired both Teller and von Neumann: Herman Kahn, the physicist and futurologist who popularized the idea of the doomsday machine. He was the personification of the military intellectual – detached and coldly rational. Like the four riders of the apocalypse, these figures come together in the unforgettable character of Dr Strangelove, the ultimate doomsday man.

For the historian and cultural commentator Lewis Mumford, responding to the New York Times’ panning of the film, Kubrick’s masterstroke was to make Dr Strangelove ‘the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination’. For Mumford, the tragedy of the age they were living in was eloquently expressed by the manic figure of this fanatical rationalist:

‘This nightmare eventuality that we have concocted for our children is nothing but a crazy fantasy, by nature as horribly crippled and dehumanized as Dr Strangelove himself.’

He concluded by hailing Kubrick’s film as ‘the first break in the catatonic cold-war trance that has so long held our country in its rigid grip.’

Mumford was absolutely right to identify Kubrick’s film as a crucial moment in the culture of the cold war. For people all over the world, Dr Strangelove soon came to personify the sinister alliance of science and power politics that made it possible to annihilate millions at the touch of a button. Dr Strangelove’s logic could transform acts of inhumanity into practical solutions, his rhetoric clothed barbarity in sweet words of reason, and his think tanks – such as the ‘Bland Corporation’ (an allusion to Herman Kahn’s RAND Corporation) – used computers to transform lives into numbers. For numbers, as Kahn once said, are something you can think the unthinkable about.

Dr Strangelove ends with an awesome display of mushroom clouds erupting across the face of the earth, as the cobalt bombs of the Soviet doomsday machine explode. News footage of H-bomb tests is accompanied by British forces’ favourite Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’. The brutal reality – fully understood by the film’s audience in 1964 – was that there would be no reunions after World War III.

The age of saviour scientists and winning weapons – familiar themes in the popular culture of the first half of the 20th century – was dead. Nuclear war in the age of the Tsar Bomba could have only one outcome: mutual annihilation. It was exactly this point that the pioneering nuclear scientist Leo Szilard had made during a radio broadcast in February 1950, when he first conjured up the spectre of the cobalt bomb, a weapon that could destroy life on Earth. It was this idea that Peter George later used in Red Alert.

In the 1960s, a new generation began to reject a life reduced to numbers and to look for answers beyond science and rationality. This generation no longer felt comfortable with the easy post-war certainties that their parents had accepted without question. For those who grew up in an age haunted by the Strangelovean cobalt bomb, the old ways of looking at the world seemed to lead to a dead end – to doomsday.

There’s another 50th anniversary this year, and that’s the death on 30 May 1964 of Leo Szilard. He was a brilliant though often infuriating man, bursting with original ideas on everything from science to politics and even fiction. He was, said one colleague, the greatest scientist never to have won a Nobel prize.

In 1933, while walking down Southampton Row in London he had seen how a self-sustaining atomic chain reaction could lead to an explosive release of nuclear energy. A close friend of Albert Einstein (they even designed a refrigerator together), it was Szilard who encouraged the great physicist to write to President Roosevelt in August 1939 warning of the possibility that Nazi Germany might develop an atomic superweapon. Leo Szilard was inspired by a utopian vision of how science and scientists could transform the world, but he was also haunted by a fear of how people might misuse this power. His life epitomizes the glories and follies of twentieth-century science and history.

I told the remarkable story of Leo Szilard and his nuclear hopes and fears, examined through the lens of popular culture, in my book Doomsday Men published seven years ago. I think it remains relevant, both as an exploration of our ambivalence towards science and scientists, and as a history of weapons of mass destruction. Today, cold-war tensions may have faded from the public mind and the media may be preoccupied with global warming, but the weapons are still out there, and the doomsday men are still at work developing new ones.

Few if any authors write for the money. I do it because I love books – both reading them and writing them. Doomsday Men and my last book, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, took at least three years to research and write. The book I’m now working on – a cultural history of crime, detectives and cities – will also take at least that long. Nowadays advances from publishers are extremely modest (I’m being polite; stronger words occur to me). You couldn’t live on them for a year, let alone three. I’m not an academic, so I scrape a living together by reviewing and editing.

There’s a lot of talk nowadays about crowdfunding new books and arts projects. That’s fine but the best way I know of supporting an author whose work you enjoy is to buy their books, and that includes their backlist too. So if you’ve enjoyed reading this brief post, which of course is based on what I wrote in my book Doomsday Men, then you might like to consider reading the whole book.

You can buy absurdly cheap copies of it now on Amazon (I don’t know who profits from these; certainly not the author) or if you really want to support me and my writing you might like to consider buying the e-book. You can buy it direct from Penguin (ePub) or from Amazon in the UK (Kindle), or Barnes & Noble (Nook) in the US.

Thank you for reading. Now go and watch Kubrick’s amazing film!

The New York Nobody Knows

Sociologist William B Helmreich knows New York City better than most people. He has walked almost every block in the city's five boroughs. That's 6,048 miles in the last four years. Or, measured in shoe leather - that's nine pairs of shoes. Helmreich admits that "you have to be a little crazy to explore the city as I did". But the result is a wonderful book, one that echoes with the voices of one of the greatest cities on the planet.

My review of The New York Nobody Knows is in Saturday's Guardian. This is the first paragraph:

'"Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city", writes Iain Sinclair in Lights Out for the Territory. It's a truth that was discovered in 19th-century Paris by the flâneur – that "botanist on asphalt", to use Walter Benjamin's memorable phrase – who turned the city's boulevards into drawing rooms in which to dissect the metropolitan crowd. And now, from Tokyo to London, urbanophiles agree that it is through what Michel de Certeau beautifully termed "the long poem of walking" that you can truly understand that most complex and beguiling feature of modern life: the city.'

Read the rest online here.

City published in Japan

The Japanese edition of City arrived in the post today and it looks great! It's published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in Tokyo, one of my favourite cities, and is available from Amazon Japan and all good bookstores. Enjoy!

The Round Tower

Until last week, whenever I thought about Copenhagen - and I admit that was not often - three people came to mind: Niels Bohr, Jan Gehl, and Sarah Lund.

Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics was at the cutting edge of theoretical physics in the early 1930s, and the setting for a memorable performance of Goethe's Faust by the scientists (much more on this here). Jan Gehl is an influential Danish urbanist and architect who pioneered pedestrianization in cities. In 1962, Copenhagen became the first city to pedestrianize a main thoroughfare. The two-kilometer-long Strøget is Europe's longest pedestrian street or, to be more accurate, collection of streets. And, of course, as all fans of crime fiction know, Copenhagen provides the setting for Detective Inspector Sarah Lund's investigations in the superb Danish TV series Forbrydelsen (The Killing, 2007).

But now when I think of Copenhagen another name springs to mind, and with it a unique building.

Last week I spent a relaxing couple of days in Copenhagen. It's a beautiful city of red-tiled rooftops, bicycles, cobbled streets full of people rather than choked with cars, and colourful houses reflected in canals. Great street performers too, like these two demonstrating an impressive balancing trick.

It's also a city that is clearly serious about its environmental responsibilities: for instance, the city recycles more of its waste than any other European capital. But above all it's a wonderfully friendly city.

The man who did most to shape the city you see today is King Christian IV who was known as the "architect king". During his sixty-year reign (1588-1648) he fortified the city and reclaimed land from the sea. He also built the Rosenborg Palace (1606), with its moat and elegant red-brick towers. One of its more unusual features is the Mirror Cabinet, created for Frederik IV in about 1700, a small chamber with mirrors on each wall and even on the floor, which apparently the King used to peer up women's skirts.

Beautiful though the Rosenborg Palace undoubtedly is, I was more impressed by another of Christian IV's buildings. The Rundetårn, or Round Tower, rises above the pedestrian zone, on Købmagergade. Modelled on Tycho Brahe's famous observatory called Stjerneborg (the castle of the stars), the 42-metre-high Round Tower is Europe’s oldest functioning astronomical observatory. Built between 1637 and 1642, it was part of Christian IV's Trinitatis Complex which combined a church, a scholarly library (holding some 10,000 books) and an observatory into one enlightened architectural structure.

But what is truly remarkable about this tower - and apparently it is unique in European architecture - is the 209-metre spiral ramp that leads up to the viewing platform at the top: a sinuous pathway, paved with ochre-coloured bricks, winding itself seven and a half times around the hollow core of the tower. It's an extraordinary structure that feels almost natural rather than man-made, as if it is a stone tree that has grown out of the heart of the city. As I walked up the spiral path, I was reminded of the fantastical towers of Dutch artist MC Escher or something dreamed up by Borges.

It's said that when Tsar Peter the Great of Russia visited the city in 1716 he rode up to the top on horseback. And in 1902, a visiting German demonstrated the power of the latest Benz-Gaggenau automobile by driving up the spiral ramp. (There's an amazing photo of this surreal moment in technological and architectural history here.) Fortunately, Copenhagen has subsequently decided to keep cars in the city firmly under control. There is little doubt that if, like me, you prefer to explore a city on foot or on bicycle then this is as close as it gets to urban heaven. More people cycle to work in Copenhagen than in the entire United States of America, as Taras Grescoe has pointed out.

From the top of the Round Tower you can gaze out across the roofscape of the medieval city centre, with its winding streets and half-timbered houses. In the distance you can even see the 8-kilometre-long Øresund Bridge that links Denmark and Sweden.

Copenhagen is a memorable city, designed for people rather than cars, and one that other cities have much to learn from. It's a community with a rich history, not a collection of densely populated, Ballardian traffic islands, as so many cities have become. For visitors from Britain, it's not a cheap city though - eating out was certainly more expensive than Berlin, for instance. But we found some great cafés and restaurants. A couple that spring to mind: a really excellent fish restaurant is the Fiskebar, near the central station; and if you like Italian food, La Rocca is the place for you. And of course, wherever you go the many pastries and different types of bread are all delicious. I wish we had a Danish Konditori near us...

So thank you - or "Tak" as they say there - Copenhagen for making me feel welcome (at the airport the border guard actually said "welcome to Denmark!" when he handed me my passport; I bet UK officials don't say that at Heathrow). And thank you Copenhagen for introducing me to the Rundetårn and to your architect king, Christian IV.

As ever, you can find more pictures of Copenhagen on my Flickr page.

Berlin and Munich Revisited

I first visited Berlin in winter 1990, a year after the momentous events that led to the fall of the German Democratic Republic. I was studying German literature at university and Berlin was a city I had already explored through the pages of novels, such as Döblin's wonderful Berlin Alexanderplatz. When I was there the Wall was still standing, although it was being steadily eroded by souvenir hunters armed with hammers and chisels, each one eager to salvage a concrete piece of Cold War history. I remember how deeply strange it felt, unreal even, to walk beside what the GDR had termed an "Antifaschistischer Schutzwall" (anti-Fascist protective barrier), venturing into areas where not long ago only armed border guards were allowed to walk. More than a hundred people were killed trying to escape to the West from the eastern sector.

Buildings near the eastern side of the Wall looked as though they had been trapped in a time warp, their blackened façades still pock-marked with bullet holes and shrapnel scars from the last war.

The sign at Checkpoint Charlie looked like a prop from a Cold War movie. At any moment, I expected to catch sight of Harry Palmer hurrying past to a rendezvous with a Soviet spy in some dark Berlin alley.

When I went back at the end of the 1990s, Berlin was being transformed. The city had become one giant building site. Potsdamer Platz was a vast, muddy hole in the ground and cranes stalked the city's skyline. The strident sounds of construction - pile-drivers and pneumatic drills - were the birth cries of a new united Berlin.

Revisiting the city today I'm struck by how different it feels. The mud, bulldozers and blackened façades have largely gone. The city's monuments, like the Brandenburg Gate, have now been cleaned and restored. Grime scrubbed away and scars healed. The once divided city has been replaced by an apparently united and confident capital. There are new glass and steel edifices on every street, it seems. As a result the city's past is less visible. But it's still there. And sometimes all you have to do to find it, is to look down at your feet.

Stolpersteine - stumbling stones - commemorate the victims of National Socialism and are placed in the pavement outside their former homes. There are thousands of these Stolpersteine in Berlin's streets. It's a beautifully simple and resonant idea, the brainchild of artist Gunter Demnig. These stumbling stones make the past vividly present: it's there beneath your feet, waiting to be discovered like the layers of history that lie just under the surface of any ancient city.

"Irgenwann fällt jede Mauer" - eventually every wall falls. That was one of the slogans painted onto the Berlin Wall. And, indeed, most of the Wall has now gone, ground up to make gravel for the roads that now link East and West Berlin. A structure that once divided people finally helped to bring them back together again. In today's somewhat sterile Potsdamer Platz, a small piece of the Wall remains, its graffiti-scrawled surface now embellished with pieces of chewing gum. The structure that once defined this city is now almost invisible, an absent presence whose former course is traced through the square by a line of unobtrusive cobblestones. Once again, history lies beneath your feet in this city.

 

Alongside the River Spree, a longer section of the Wall remains, turned into an impromptu canvas for street artists and renamed the East Side Gallery. It includes this great piece by Thierry Noir who, together with Christophe Bouchet, was one of the first artists to paint the western side of the Wall in 1984.

Sadly the future is uncertain for at least part of what is the longest remaining stretch of the Wall. The land beneath it is growing more valuable by the day and developers are gathering for the kill. A new apartment block and a hotel are on the drawing board and once again the bulldozers are on the move.

In the new Berlin there is undoubtedly much that is impressive, such as Norman Foster's reconstruction of the Reichstag. The view across the city from its dome is truly memorable. It was certainly worth getting up early on a bright Sunday morning to see it, before too many tour groups arrived. It's a remarkable structure. But in this city haunted by its past, what particularly struck me was the graffiti made in 1945 by Soviet soldiers, who scratched their names on the parapets of the roof as they looked out across the blackened, bombed-out ruins of a once great city.

A city is a palimpsest. Each generation writes their own urban story. But some traces of the past need to be retained as we hurry into the future.

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum (2001) is another powerful piece of architecture. Instead of the uplifting transparency of Foster's dome, Libeskind's building is full of unsettling, disorientating spaces, such as the Holocaust Tower, where the distant sounds of the city echo in the darkness.

The Holocaust Memorial, designed by Peter Eisenman (2005), was certainly powerful but I found it also strangely anonymous. A grey, nameless necropolis at the heart of the living city. Coming across the Stolpersteine in Berlin's cobbled streets was for me a far more poignant reminder of the city's - and Germany's - dark past.

While I was in Berlin I saw an exhibition at the Pergamon Museum about one of the earliest cities - "Uruk: 5000 Jahre Megacity". If you're visiting Berlin before it ends in September and you're interested in the history of cities, this is a must-see. They have brought together an extraordinarily rich collection of artefacts illustrating the life and culture of the world's first urban civilization.

Like Berlin, Uruk was also famous for its wall, some 9 km long and constructed using 306,000,000 bricks. For the Sumerians who founded Uruk more than five thousand years ago, Eden was not a garden but a city. In their legends the first city was called Eridu and it was created by the god Marduk. He wanted to give his people a place of shelter, a refuge to protect them from a natural world that can be harsh and unforgiving. The Sumerians did not long for some mythic rural idyll, an unobtainable Arcadia. They believed the city was the place where all their dreams would be realised. And Uruk became one of the largest of their cities - although, with respect to the organisers of the exhibition, not quite a "megacity".

The exhibition is superb though. This 4000-year-old clay plaque of a winged goddess (possibly Ishtar) struck me as being especially beautiful.

Berlin has certainly changed since I first visited. That's not surprising. Change is an essential part of urban life. Old structures must make way for new ones. But there is a powerful continuity, too, in cities. That continuity has at its heart the human story of desires and dreams, a story that stretches back to Uruk and beyond. Amidst the glass and steel and optimism of today's cities, we need reminders, like the Stolpersteine, of those human stories.

After a few days in Berlin, I caught the ICE train down south to Munich, where I lived in the early 1990s. It's a beautiful city, but of course very different from Berlin, both then and now. Apart from the Dirndls and Lederhosen, it's always been a more affluent and expensive city. For foreigners like me, the dialect is also far more difficult to understand. One of my first ports of call in Munich was the Olydorf, or the 1972 Olympic Village, where I used to live.

It's been renovated recently which I hope means that today's student occupants no longer have to put up with cockroaches in the apartments and pigeons occupying the balconies. (Eventually I became quite skilled at dispatching cockroaches with a rolled up copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.) Some things do change - and for the better.

But I was relieved to see that other things hadn't changed. My favourite café-bar in Munich was Drugstore, opposite Wedekindplatz in Schwabing. It was founded in the swinging sixties and is still going strong. It's the friendliest bar anywhere. And they serve great food. What more can you ask for? Well, perhaps another beer...

In fact, in Munich many things were just as I remembered them. The Englischer Garten, which opened in 1791, is still one of the most beautiful urban parks I know.

The Viktualienmarkt still offers a mouth-watering selection of the most perfect food on the planet.

And, of course, a Weizen remains the best beer on this world or any other.

But some things have changed in Munich. The city is expanding, as is clear from the extended U-Bahn lines. The city's art galleries have been attracting international visitors since 1830 when the Glyptothek opened. New galleries have opened since I was there, including the Pinakothek der Moderne and the beautifully designed Museum Brandhorst. The Lenbachhaus, one of my favourite art galleries (I love its Blaue Reiter collection), has also been expanded and is now even better than before.

If you go to the Lenbachhaus, don't miss Rudolf Schlichter's brilliant portrait of Bertolt Brecht. Although in most people's minds, Brecht is associated with Berlin - both before and after the war (he is buried in the Dorotheen Cemetery in what was East Berlin) - he was born and grew up in Augsburg, not far from Munich. He also lived in Munich in the 1920s.

Walking around Munich today and travelling on its excellent public transport system, I was pleased to see that the city that used to pride itself on being the "Weltstadt mit Herz" - the world city with heart - is now far more diverse than it once was. The world has come to Munich. Despite its conservatism and love of tradition, Munich is now truly a global city.

It was great to revisit Berlin and Munich. They are very different cities. But both are dynamic, exciting places with long histories and promising futures - cities where anything can happen. A sign I saw in the wonderful Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin put it perfectly: If you can dream it, you can do it.

And that's true now in vibrant cities like Berlin or Munich, just as it once was in Uruk.

You can see all the photos in this post, as well as more from Berlin and Munich, on my Flickr page in higher quality than my site allows (there's a set for Berlin and Munich). I hope this post and the images encourage you to visit some of the places for yourself.

If you do, here are a few recommendations of cafés and restaurants.

In Berlin: Restoration 1900, a great local bar-restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg. For a special occasion Alpenstueck is worth trying. The Friday Turkish market off Kottbusser Strasse is amazing. If you're looking for fresh food, this is the place to go. Near here at Paul-Lincke-Ufer 42, Cau is a friendly bar with a wonderfully sunny terrace beside the canal. If you're in Mitte, Café Oliv is worth a visit.

In Munich: wie schon gesagt, Drugstore. One of my other favourite bar-restaurants is Atzinger near the university - a relaxed place, that serves huge portions and great beer. If you're around Frauenhoferstrasse, Das Kranz is a great little restaurant. For superb Vietnamese food look no further than Cyclo in Theresienstrasse. And for a delicious vegetarian menu, go to Prinz Myshkin not far from Marienplatz. If you like beer gardens, head for the Chinesischer Turm in the Englischer Garten. An amazing setting to enjoy a beer. Viel Spass!

Audiobook of City

I spent yesterday on a train (actually, several trains) listening for the first time to the audiobook of City. The narrator is Steven Crossley and he reads it beautifully. It's a new experience for me, listening to someone else read my words. I haven't heard all of it yet - it's more than thirteen hours long! - but I certainly enjoyed the experience. And I hope you will too. You can find it at Audible in the UK or the US.

City is still picking up reviews, most recently in the Spring 2013 issue of Urban Design journal, where it was described as "an excellent introduction to the city, and should be on every student's reading list".

Old newspapers

For the last couple of days I've been reading old newspapers as part of my research for Watching the Detectives. I love it - you come across such remarkable stories. And the language, particularly in the eighteenth-century papers, is wonderful. I enjoyed this item from the News in Brief column of the Times in 1921:

"At Old-street Police Court yesterday an old man complained to Mr. Clarke Hall that he had lent his daughter £10, which she refused to give back. The daughter said he had given it her to bury him."

Audiobook of City

I have just been told that Audible have chosen City as one of the titles they will be producing in audiobook format this year! I can't wait to hear what City will sound like...