In Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past, Steven Conn provides an incisive, learned, and proudly unconventional portrait of the Philadelphia region. This richly textured and well-written volume attempts neither an exhaustive historical synthesis nor a focused examination of a particular time period or topic. Instead, Conn successfully strives for something different and distinctive—a deeply personal look through the prism of socioeconomic, cultural, religious, and environmental lenses at how Philadelphia’s past and present interact with and shape each other. What emerges from this undertaking is an invaluable work that joins the ranks of Nathaniel Popkin’s Song of the City (2002) and Buzz Bissinger’s A Prayer for the City (1997) in helping us understand the essence of what Philadelphia is now and how it got that way.