How long does it take to read Four Lost Cities?
Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz takes about 5 hours 34 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 34 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2021. 304 pages, about 83,600 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 17 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 34 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 29 minutes |
The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history--and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of C ʹatalho yu k in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy's southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers--slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers--who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate"--
Subjects: Extinct cities, Catal mound (turkey), Pompeii (extinct city), Angkor (extinct city), Cahokia (ill.), Illinois, antiquities
