THE CITY IN HISTORY (657 pp.)Lewis MumfordHarcourf, Brace & World ($ 11.50).
Lewis Mumford has probably staked out as good a claim as any to being the U.S.'s leading critic of its cities, towns and cultural highways and byways. In the 1920s, when Van Wyck Brooks was discovering the unrecognized richness of the U.S. literary past and Poet Hart Crane was apotheosizing the Brooklyn Bridge, Mumford's Sticks and Stones, A Study of American Architecture and Civilization was the first, brash exploration of American town planning and building, ranging from the New England Common...