More biography than conventional history, this substantial work tracks the changing personality of Auckland through the twentieth century, as recorded by its inhabitants in diaries and oral histories, as well as newspapers and formal records. Auckland in 1999 would have been unrecognisable to the city's residents in 1900. Professor Paul Moon explores this transformation in themes including housing, gardening, the harbours, tangata whenua struggles, shopping culture, the immigrant experience -- and the pervading sense that Auckland was simultaneously at the edge of the world and at its centre.