Few books having been written on urban history in the Caribbean, Stuempfle's Port of Spain deserves its place on scholars’ bookshelves, and not simply by default. The city's landscape is his focus: its streets, parks, squares, yards, buildings and other features. That landscape, he argues, ‘served as a central site for the display and negotiation of Trinidad's social order as the colony transitioned from colonial rule to independence’ (p. 2). The period under review is just seven decades, an understandably short span because Port of Spain does not have the long-recorded history of, for example, Spanish Town in Jamaica, Bridgetown in Barbados or Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe. Of the three parts in the book, the first examines 1888 to 1920 when cocoa brought significant earnings to the colony, the second looks at the inter-war years with the rise of modernist forms of architecture, and the third examines the period 1940 to 1962 marked by the massive American military presence in World War II and the colony's attainment of independence from Britain.

The strength of this book is the wide-ranging investigation that Stuempfle has conducted. The development of the city is explored in depth: its pronounced northern and westward sprawl, housing for both the lower and upper classes, public buildings, the emergence of an American town – the Docksite military base – within downtown Port of Spain during the war, parks and public monuments including the unveiling of the first outdoor representation of a local luminary in 1959, and enhancement of the city's infrastructure such as roads, water supply, sanitation, electrification and the port. But this book is more than an impersonal study of Port of Spain. Stuempfle provides sketches of the local, British, American and Indian architects, town planners, engineers and builders responsible for design and construction. Apart from the professionals, we also have ordinary people as in chapter 4, where he delves into the housing and recreational spaces of the city's working class. Attention is also paid to the advent of American tourists. Anyone interested in the Caribbean city as a place of resistance, protest and celebration must pore over this book. Port of Spain was the locality for Empire Day celebrations, the annual pre-Lenten carnival divided spatially by class and colour, protests by the masses like the 1902 water riot that resulted in the burning down of the seat of the colony's government, the mass rallies organized by the nationalist movement in the late fifties and the spot where Trinidad and Tobago's new national flag was unfurled for the first time in 1962.

His explorations of literature and the performing and visual arts are captivating. He touches on the emergence of the steelband, a topic in which he is well versed having already published a book on that subject, depictions of Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago's literature of the thirties and of World War II, as well as poetic voices of the independence era. Incidentally, two of the wordsmiths cited, Vidya Naipaul and Derek Walcott, eventually became Nobel laureates. His detailed descriptions of the works of art created by prominent local artists for permanent display in two of the flagship buildings opened in the early 1960s, the town hall and the Hilton hotel, will leave readers agog.

Overall, this book is meticulously researched, well written and enhanced with many non-textual primary sources such as maps and photographs from repositories in Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom and the United States. But the text is not without loopholes. The author himself acknowledges three limitations, which he has ascribed to the prejudicial nature of the primary sources. The study has a geographical bias caused, he says, by the dearth of information on the low-income eastern localities; for example, there are few photos of the poorer sections of Port of Spain. It possesses a class bias because of the paucity of working-class voices. It is tainted by a gender-bias given that the primary documents were largely created by men. I myself have noticed a fourth deficiency – the absence of references to municipal records. Since Stuempfle has been so thorough, this gap suggests that, unfortunately, potentially rich archival documents from the town hall may not yet be open to researchers, or easily accessible. Nevertheless, Stuempfle has creatively surveyed the capital city as seat of the colonial government, place of abode for rich and poor, commercial centre, arena for political protest, magnet for American tourists, scene of revelry and space for sports as well as the arts. Future researchers should be aware that surpassing his Port of Spain will be an exacting challenge.