Many historical, liturgical, regional, and sociological analyses have been published on camp meetings in North America. Cities of Zion adopts the particular lens of post-Civil War camp meeting towns constructed on the site of older camp meeting grounds in the northeast. Camp meeting towns clustered along railroad lines, enabling urbanites, mostly Methodists, to come to these towns for “revival, immersion in nature, summer-long residence, leisure and recreation” (xiv). The book delves into the brick and mortar of select camp meeting towns, particularly Ocean Grove and Round Lake, looking closely at chalet-style cottages on small plots of leased land, town planning ordinances to maintain Sabbatarianism and temperance even amid the influx of day trippers, and infrastructure construction to ensure clean water, garbage collection, and a suitable sewer system.

In a brief introduction, Avery-Quinn describes camp meetings—which he deems the “most public and traditional theater of Methodist memory” (xxv)—as well as the holiness movement in American Methodism alongside the overlapping Methodist landscapes of northeast urban neighborhoods, revivalism, forest, and wilderness. Then, in chapter 1, titled “Saints in the City,” he looks closely at New York City and Philadelphia as the two northeast cities he considers the primary shapers of the American holiness movement. He traces the intersection of increasing gentrification of Methodism as demonstrated in pew rentals, grander church architecture, and more formal, liturgical services alongside ongoing revivalism, holiness advocacy, and moral reform efforts. It is these middle-class and upper middle-class holiness Methodists, claims Avery-Quinn, who will gravitate to camp meeting towns by way of the ever expanding railroad lines emanating out from urban centers.

Chapter 2, “From Parlor to Forest Temple,” opens with an overview of camp meeting revivalism from the Second Great Awakening to the Civil War, noting seasons of transition, increase, and decline. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of the first two National Holiness Camp Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness in 1867 and 1868, respectively. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the two camp meeting towns that feature most prominently, Round Lake Camp Meeting in Saratoga County, New York, and Ocean Grove in Monmouth County, New Jersey. In both chapters, Avery-Quinn attends to the development of the towns’ grounds, the partitioning of leased lots, and the construction of small cottages.

As the camp meeting towns grew and developed, more extensive infrastructure was needed, which entailed a time-consuming project. Chapter 5, “Town Planning in the Gate of Heaven,” explores the intersections of religious ideology and town planning at Ocean Grove and Round Lake. Members of camp meeting associations possessed little experience in municipal governance which required decisions on how to deliver clean water, ensure regular garbage collection, and construct suitable sewer systems. They also had to draft regulations on the sale of food, alcohol, tobacco, and other items on the grounds, as well as the enforcement of Sabbatarianism. These rules helped to maintain the grounds, not only as a religious oasis but also as salubrious retreats from northeast urban areas.

Chapter 6, “Two Cities in Beulah,” looks at the impact of camp meeting towns on theological and ecclesial fights erupting in the first years of the twentieth century. These schisms and skirmishes involved everyone from holiness “come-outers” to social gospel proponents to contributors to the publication The Fundamentals. Even as Methodists and holiness Methodists continued their annual pilgrimages to camp meetings towns, notes Avery-Quinn, Round Lake's revivalism diminished, and it evolved into a Chautauqua platform with a Christian education focus. By 1891, there was “not a tent in sight from the railroad track” (214). Ocean Grove, in contrast, pursued a more conservative theological trajectory, particularly on the issue of higher criticism, and its promotion of “a conservative, revivalistic Protestantism as a dominant theme in the community's public discourse” existed for a much longer time than Round Lake's (227). The book's brief conclusion, “Enduring Zions,” traces the continued impact of the desacralizing of camp meeting towns and the concomitant decline of their economic sustainability.

Most of the book's chapters open with vignettes in which the author declares the emotions and reactions of historical figures such as Frances Willard, Hannah Whitall Smith, journalist Francis Dare, and opera critic and music editor Gustav Kobbé. Such novelistic details—Frances Willard “smiled” while listening to the singing of Amanda Berry Smith (xiii), “Hannah Whitall Smith was not happy” (1), Shirley “flashed a practiced smile” (100), and Kobbé was surprised that strict rules had not inhibited Ocean Grove's popularity (135)—are somewhat infelicitous and out of place in a scholarly study of the brick and mortar, the budgets and regulations of camp meeting towns.

A larger concern is the absence of a Forschungsbericht, which provides the platform for an author to articulate the book's thesis and its niche among other monographs, in this case monographs on camp meetings, American Methodism, and the holiness movement. The closest statement to a thesis comes in the following sentence: “Ocean Grove and these other camp meeting towns were not only a culmination and transformation of Methodist camp meeting revivalism, reflecting the changing worldview and revivalist practices of American Methodist in the late nineteenth century, but a religious critique and recapitulation of nineteenth-century city life and landscape” (xv).