San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture. In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodriguez Julia invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flaneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. In Puerto Rico, he muses, life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks. Julia resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.

Employing the same methodology she has used in her previous studies of Greek sculpture, Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway critically scrutinizes most of the best-known pieces of Greek sculpture to determine what can be securely considered to have been produced during 200-100 B.C. Arguing that characterizations of the second century have been overly influenced by the dramatic Pergamon Altar, Ridgway begins afresh, examining architectural sculpture, statuary in the round, funerary and votive reliefs, and the difficult cases of sculptures known only, or primarily, through later copies, or found on Italian soil but probably made by Greek masters. Her exploration ultimately reveals a tentative but plausible picture of the artistic trends of this fascinating period.