To the Editor

I've been a big fan of T&C's essay reviews of works in our field. Generally, I think the scholarly community is well served by longer, more detailed appraisals than the 750 words or so demanded by the book review genre and permitted by the available space. But I am disappointed with Josef Konvitz's recent essay review of our edited volume Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities (April 2010, 474-76).

I can't be sure of how or why Konvitz chose to frame his negative review; any scholar is entitled to her or his own assessment of a work. Still, I believe that this review falls substantially short of the thoughtful, comprehensive, well-reasoned, and insightful reviews that T&C aims to publish. The following are the most serious problems:

1. 1. The review's text does not provide sufficient evidence that the reviewer considered the volume as a whole. Three people—quite independently of one another—have suggested to me that the reviewer did not read the book. At the very least, most seriously, the review makes a number of unfortunate errors in describing the contents of the book. While the second paragraph asserts that "Airports, canals and ports, and railroads ... do not figure in this book," a close reading of chapter 5 on tourism finds prominent treatment of both airports ("the decisive technological step toward mass tourism . . . was the rebuilding of the Malaga airport" [p. 116]) and railroads ("Railways modfied the geography of tourism in Europe" [p. 111]). Canals and ports are prominent in chapter 2, which deals with the shifting economic and geographical battle between cities on the Rhine River to be "head of navigation," including substantial detail on French canals (pp. 34-35); in chapter 3 on modernizing Istanbul (p. 53), where the continuing importance of waterborne transportation is emphasized; and in chapter 13 on the harbor city of Malmö.

   Our two colleagues writing on eastern and central European cities were quite struck by the fact that the review does not identify the correct cities. Whereas the review asserts that Krakow and Budapest are treated, in fact Pál Germuska writes about eleven Hungarian socialist cities—but scarcely a word about Budapest—and Dagmara Jajesniak-Quast writes about a different Polish city, the heavy-industry center Nowa Huta as well as two other industrial cities in Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

   Notably, paragraph 6 merely lists the titles of the book's chapters.

2. 2. The reviewer's text places his own opinions foremost ("How can one write about [Europe] without an economic frame of reference? . . . One finds scarcely a reference to bonds and loans ... and profit margins" [paragraph 7]) and dismisses our volume's awareness of and engagement with "postmodern concerns about discourse," but the review has little information on the purpose of the book under review, the qualifications of the authors, and the use they made of source materials. There is no mention that the volume deals with primary and secondary sources in Swedish, German, Italian, Hungarian, French, Turkish, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Spanish, and English. Six of the chapters are drawn on recent Ph.D. or habilitation theses with extensive archival research in municipal, corporate, and/or national archives.

   The review might charitably have mentioned that this book is not a standard "collection of essays" (paragraph 2) but rather the culmination of a research effort led by my coeditor Mikael Hård that began in 2000 and included workshops with the authors in Darmstadt, York, Budapest, and Amsterdam across four years. The book resulted from one of the research groups that formed the productive Tensions of Europe network, which provided the financial means and intellectual occasion for bringing together such an international group. This background, stated clearly in the book's two-page preface (vii-viii) is relevant to an accurate assessment of purpose and qualification.

3. 3. While criticizing the book, the review does not make any appraisal of the book's place in the existing scholarly literature or, indeed, whether it adds to scholarly knowledge at all. The review mentions the "ancient" authors, namely Marx, Weber, Georg Simmel, and Robert Park, but otherwise...