The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space, and Economic Change in an American Metropolis. By Barry Bluestone and Mary Huff Stevenson, with contributions from Michael Massagli, Philip Moss, and Chris Tilly. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Pp. xiii, 461. $45.00

The greater Boston area has experienced a remarkable economic resurgence in the last two decades. Beginning in the late nineteenth century the declining fortunes of its leading manufacturing industries—textiles and boots and shoes—contributed to a sustained economic slide that was not reversed until the early 1980s. By 1982 a Brookings Institution study citing high and rising unemployment, rising crime rates, poor housing, municipal debt burden and tax disparity ranked the Boston SMSA near the bottom of urban America, below cities such as Detroit, Gary, Newark, and Oakland. These trends were sharply reversed in the 1980s and early 1990s, however. Propelled by the rise of high-technology industries, the growing importance of medical care in the economy, and the contributions of its concentration of colleges and universities, Boston ranked first among urban areas in growth of median family incomes during the 1980s, while its surrounding suburbs ranked second among suburban areas.