Nonfiction Notes

Clearly modeled on Eugene Atget's meticulous documentation of Parisian architecture high and low, former New York Times photographer Jorg Brockmann's One Thousand New York Buildings captures, if not always from ideal angles, everything from the Little Church Around the Corner (on E. 29th St.) to the Russian Tea Room, the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory (at the New York Botanical Garden) and the Jamaica Business Resource Center in Queens. Uptown apartment buildings such as the Dakota and 1001 Fifth Avenue share covers with the Police Building Apartments downtown and Crotona Terrace in the Bronx. Every borough is represented in more than 1,000 four-to-a-page b&w photos and short descriptions of each building by Bill Harris, author of 17 books about New York, including a history of the Plaza Hotel. (Black Dog & Leventhal, $34.98 576p ISBN 1-57912-237-X; Aug.)

The indefinite singular article ("an") would be more appropriate in the subtitle of this paean to one of the Northeast's oldest and most vibrant cities: Philadelphia. In Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape, urban planner and activist Nathaniel Popkin walks the city's 135 square miles, offering vivid descriptions ("Like a heaving stomach, the bursts of noise come and go") of the cityscape. And from the regulars at Abby's Desert Lounge to attendees at Blue Bell Hill's third annual neighborhood history night, the 12 members of the House of Prestige (Father Prestige's Germantown shelter), and impatient tram riders, Popkin buttonholes his fellow citizens, and recounts their stories. (Four Walls Eight Windows, $24.95 212p ISBN 1-56858-203-X; Aug. 1)

Freud introduced the West to the unconscious, but the last half-century of psychology has reinvented it, argues University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy D. Wilson. In Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, Wilson attempts to explain why there's so much about ourselves that we fail to understand, which can lead to misdirected anger. He points to a revised, post-Freudian understanding of how the mind works: the reason that their own "judgments, feelings, [and] motives" remain mysterious to people is not repression, as Freud argued, but efficiency—so that the mind can process and analyze multiple things at once. Wilson looks at ways that readers can probe their unconscious, suggesting that soliciting the opinions of others is actually more valuable than introspection. (Harvard/Belknap, $27.95 320p ISBN 0-674-00936-3)