Flesh and Stone

This vivid history of the city in Western civilization tells the story of urban life through bodily experience.

Flesh and Stone is the story of the deepest parts of life—how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love—all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York.

Early in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett probes the ways in...