The Exploding City

Schiffer ( Looking Outward ) and Cooke (staff photographer for Time Inc.) take the reader on a nine-city tour of the world in approximately 100 color and 300 black-and-white photographs. Stopping at Cairo, Shanghai, Rome, Lagos, Tokyo, Bombay, Moscow, Mexico City and New York, we are introduced to problematic aspects of ``megapolis'' living, particularly those of still-developing countries where urban populations are growing astronomically. Many of the black-and-white pictures, unfortunately grainy and overexposed, depict the homeless and the squalid living conditions of the near-homeless; others record traffic jams of bicycles, buses, cars and pedestrians. Incongruously, many of the illustrations are simple snapshots--smiling children, classical architecture, people at work--unrelated to the dire predictions of the text, itself speculative and cliched. The points brought up in this book merit more thoughtful treatment than accorded here. (July)