Amsterdam

This was actually a pretty good book, albeit very straight and male. It essentially a pop-history book, but made arguably more elegant by having an overarching if somewhat simplistic argument throughout: that Amsterdam is the birth place of liberalism, both meant as a set of ideas concerning freedom, tolerance and human rights, and also as an ideology promoting individualism and self-enrichment. Indeed, those are two side of the same coin. The argument kind of works, connecting disparate topics that seem important to Amsterdam's history: land reclamation (which requires collaboration but was carried out so that individuals retained control over land), trade, bourgeois portrait art, the resistance to and complicity with the Nazi, coffee shop and counter culture, social housing. In the chapters about the more recent history, however, I struggled to overlook the book's smug celebration of Dutch (and US) society, its quick glossing over the horrors of colonialism, the unthinking treatment of anti-squatting laws as common sense.