The end of World War II symbolized beginning of a new era in US metropolitan development – the rise of the key political and cultural opposition between the American city (the traditional symbol of the nation's greatness, with its daring allusions to Roman patterns) and the newly rediscovered “suburbia” (the term ironically deriving from “suburb+utopia”) signifying the major phenomenon for the future of urban America. Jon C. Teaford, the outstanding historian of American urban life and the author of numerous books on the topic, unfolds the thrilling story of the shift from the long-established centripetal city development towards fragmentation and sprawling in his The Metropolitan Revolution – another book of the Columbia History of Urban Life series.

The phenomenon of the mid-century reorientation from vertical urban growth to horizontal spreading is often analyzed in view of mainly two factors, namely economy and race. Teaford makes the phenomenon much more comprehensive when he goes step by step through its major stages and embraces a wider context. Each of the book's chapters deals with a decade starting from the key year of 1945 up to the end of the twentieth century, with a special focus on such core elements of urban life as (sub)culture and economy, business and trade, construction and transportation, relations among races and generations, school system and entertainment. The author very clearly explains the intricate political background and makes the half-century of American urban history accessible for a wider audience of readers. It is fascinating to follow the logic of such core processes as, say, the uneasy transformation of the black–white American city into a multiethnic one due to the waves of immigration from Latin America, Asia and Europe; the blight of large cities notorious for crime and drugs, followed by gentrification and the numerous and hardly realistic recentering projects and so on.

Due to the well-structured text rich in documentary evidences, striking examples and direct-speech quotations, the book offers its reader a gripping voyage through the history of the revolution that changed America forever – through the past and present of the depressed Detroit and the ever-growing New York, the illusory Los Angeles and the varied San Francisco, as well as the numerous “Levittowns” now forming vast centerless urban zones so overwhelmingly essential to the modern American identity.