Great reading that provides a sense of the city, from the Traveler online Ultimate Travel Library.
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Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City, by Geert Mak (1999)
A popular historian and storyteller, Geert Mak offers a lively, often surprising story of the city.
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, by Simon Schama (1987)
A masterwork of a popular history that examines how and why Amsterdam became one of the first truly modern cities.
Rembrandt’s Eyes, by Simon Schama (1999)
This biography of the painter also evokes the dynamic, multicultural city that embraced him.
Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank (1947)
A 20th-century classic; the diary of the young Jewish girl hiding out from the Nazis, yet still sustained by a sense of hope and the memory of Amsterdam’s beauty.
On the Water, by Hans Maarten van den Brink (1998)
This poetic novella about two oarsmen training for the Olympics in 1939 captures the last golden Amsterdam summer before the war swept in.
Amsterdam, edited by Manfred Wolf (2001)
A gold-star collection of impressionistic essays on Amsterdam’s different faces, by Holland’s leading literary names.
Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan (1989)
Booker Prize-winning novella featuring a composer desperately trying to finish a work scheduled to premiere in Amsterdam.
Rituals, by Cees Nooteboom (1980)
Follows a suicidal protagonist as he wanders the streets of Amsterdam, finding redemption in chance encounters; by one of Holland’s most highly regarded novelists.
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