Dublin: The Making of a Capital Cityby David DicksonThe Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2014"We inhale the Atlantic vapours and they turn us into mystics, poets, politicians, and unemployables with school-girl complexions," wrote Oliver St. John Gogarty in his great 1937 "phantasy in fact," As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, "And yet her only thanks is to send us for April her eastern winds, whose influence is influenza. No one makes allowance enough for us who live in this vat of fumes from the lost Atlantis."Trinity College history professor David Dickson makes ample, boisterous, over-abundant allowance for the strange vapors that have breathed through a thousand years of Dublin's history, and although he's churlish enough to leave Gogarty (whom George Moore once characterized as "the author of all the jokes that enable us to live in Dublin") entirely out of his enormous book, he makes room for Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel The Informer, James Plunkett's 1969 novel Strumpet City, and the novels of Maeve Binchy ... and of course the whole thing toils in the shadow of Gogarty's significantly less-talented contemporary James Joyce, without whose overblown and unreadable 1922 novel Ulysses the city would be evacuated and declared officially abandoned.Dickson starts his story with the primordial settlement under Viking rule and moves it forward in rapid, sure stages through the city's growth in medieval times (the first charter being issued in 1171 under Henry II) to its economic birth-pangs in Elizabethan times through the enormous internecine strife that tore it apart several times in its history to - in the book's brightest-observed chapters, the darkest hours of the early 20th Century, when the Easter Uprising of 1916 brought open warfare to the city's streets. Dickson does a strictly conscientious job at giving all eras relatively equal time on his stage and to let all the people who've betrayed Dublin over the centuries have their moment in the spotlight, and he does a comprehensive job detailing the dangers faced by all, including when one of the worst of those traitors, Oliver Cromwell, had to deal with one of the worst of those dangers, plague:

As the New Model Army began the three-year reconquest of Ireland, Dublin festered. The constant circulation of ill-kempt soldiers and displaced civilians was now combined with the half-forgotten hazard - bubonic plague. This swept through the town in three waves over five years; the first in the summer of 1650 was the most lethal. It was later claimed that 1,300 residents per week were dying at its peak.

Dublin: The Making of a Capital City limps across its finish line, growing rhetorically weaker the closer it gets to the 21st Century and its list of tawdry economic collapses and bailouts. Dickson's tone shifts from a vigorous historical momentum to a more tentative, questioning approach as his story begins to look forward into a future that's unlikely to be as eventful - for good or ill - as the past:

In a low-density city with overloaded city traffic, the fall in communication costs, local and distant, helped reduce a comparative economic disadvantage, even if there were hidden social costs. In the light of these, can one really talk about Dublin as a social organism by the turn of the millennium, what with its emptying churches, its forgotten trade halls, its homogenised high streets and suburban malls, its sanitised beer-halls and international coffee docks?

"Dublin has one advantage: it is easy to get out of it," Gogarty wrote in his masterpiece. "Unlike London, which is bottled on three sides and uninteresting on the fourth, Dublin has the country and the streamy hills very near and nearer still the sea." The ease of getting out of the city is the worry hanging over the close of Dickson's immensely satsifying history, but the history itself, regardless of the doubt of the modern crossroads, is so well-rendered that the book easily recommends itself.