Throughout, Herman displays prodigious knowledge of port-city dwellings along the Atlantic seaboard (Newport and New York escape close scrutiny, however), in England and, to a lesser degree, in the Netherlands and Germany. Chapter six, for example, surveys hundreds of artisan houses, revealing unexpected variations in size, from tiny, one-room dwellings, to small, well-finished three or four-room houses, to a "mansion." This chapter also displays Herman's passion for material culture. Even the smallest artisan house, however crowded, contained culturally resonant objects, such as a tea tray, suggesting its owner's knowledge of "the trappings of polite sociability" even if circumstances "reduced means for enacting the associated behaviors." In his last major chapter, Herman studies travelers, searches their luggage, again looking for objects betokening genteel behavior, and then follows their owners into boarding houses, taverns, inns, and coffee houses, most of them converted residences, not purpose-built structures.Herman's study sparkles with ideas, as if in joining his vast knowledge of building layouts and material culture, he were striking two flints together to illuminate ways of life long lost from view. Urban historians already familiar with the port cities of the Atlantic world will relish the many sparks: for example, those that show how workplace and residence, which were so often combined in what Kenneth T. Jackson called the "walking city" (a concept not utilized by Herman), were accommodated within actual dwellings; or those that reveal how the poorest artisans lacked sufficient space for sitdown meals, unless they ate in shifts.To get the full benefit of such findings, however, the reader must examine, often very closely, over seventy floor plans (better identification of room use is sometimes needed).Herman has produced a splendid commentary but not a full accounting of what he calls "town house experiences" (p. 32). A city in any era is a complex unit. The size and scale of its businesses, its means of circulation, its sanitary arrangements, its food-marketing practices, its energy sources all influence the house layouts, lot shapes, and yard functions that shaped daily life at the personal level.Herman's methods certainly cast light on typical kitchen-placement-in cellars, in first-floor backrooms, in back-of-the-house ells, or in detached rear-lot buildings, or tell us how a shopkeeper's wife might have presented herself to the world by serving tea in her secondfloor "best room" above her husband's first-floor business. From a twenty-first-century vantage, however, we also need to know how life proceeded without electricity, without running water, without plumbing, without central heating, without window screens, without small motors. The answers to such questions require a greater consciousness of how town houses worked within the city's overall social-economic environment.