MAN IN METROPOLIS: A BOOK ABOUT THE PEOPLE AND PROSPECTS OF A METROPOLITAN REGION.

By LouisB. Schlivek '40. New York: Doubleday &Co., Inc., 1965. 432 pp. $7.50.

It is one of the tragic paradoxes of contemporary American life that we have tended to view those intensely human concentrations that make up our great metropolitan areas in coldly impersonal statistical terms. Only during very recent years have our federal authorities begun to wrestle comprehensively with the social, as well as the physical, challenges of our core cities. Yet, despite this newly emerging central city orientation, we have continued to regard the modern metropolis as a highly nihilistic, if not totally dehumanized, territorial labyrinth.

The uniquely refreshing virtue of Louis B. Schlivek's Man in Metropolis is its emphasis on "the people of a great region, how they are shaping its future - and their own." The basic theme of this book is both very simple and very profound. Beginning with a description of the leveling of a New Jersey family's 200-year-old farmhouse to make way for a new suburban housing development, Mr. Schlivek reaches out to touch the lives of thirteen other very real people who work and laugh and cry in the great regional environment that makes up metropolitan New York. Supplemented by a collection of moving photographs taken by the author, the story traces "the interplay between personal circumstances and metropolitan pressures sureswhich brought the characters to the situations in which we see them."

Mr. Schlivek prepared his study in cooperation with the Regional Plan Association of New York and one of his most basic objectives is that of giving life to the ninevolume Metropolitan Regional Study which Harvard University conducted on behalf of the RPA in 1959-60. As a result of this orientation, the different individuals in the book represent a wide cross-section of economic interests - a Wall Street broker, a belt factory operator, a garment manufacturer, a sewer maintenance worker, a marketing vice president of a national concern and the like. One could argue that the particular range of characters Mr. Schlivek has chosen for his book hardly reflects the full diversity of the complex New York metropolitan politanregion, yet what handful of characters could completely capture such a dazzling variety of human concerns? The important point is that Mr. Schlivek has given us a fresh look at one of our greatest metropolitan areas, and in so doing he has dramatized the basic truth that the modern metropolis is basically people, rather than miles of cloverleaf or annual dollar value of office construction.

In short, I liked this book very much. In part it struck a particularly appealing note to me because I grew up in a suburban New Jersey community only a few miles removed from the ill-fated Ackerman farmhouse; and I was able to identify very closely with the various individuals in the book. Yet, I would suspect that I am not really unique in this respect. Certainly anyone who lives in the metropolitan New York area, as well as in the other great regional centers that make up modern urban America, should have little difficulty recognizing themselves in the vast and moving metropolitan mosaic that Mr. Schlivek has painted for us.

Associate Professor of Government