CITY MOVES A User’s Guide to the Way Cities Work <i> by Stephen Friedman (McGraw-Hill: $22.50; 310 pp.) </i>

“City Moves” initially seems too good to be true, with intriguingly titled chapters (e.g., “The Theatrics of City Life”) promising to demystify the ideas of hundreds of urban and regional planners. And unfortunately, this is a case where first impressions prove correct, for in order to view all of these theories in one glance, Stephen Friedman is forced to stand at such a distance from them that colors fade and details become obscure.

Failing to evoke the wonder of cities--the way they choreograph social rituals, for example, or parent their populations--”City Moves” is burdened by verbose definitions (“Community has been defined by the sociologist Gideon Sjoberg as ‘a collectivity of actors sharing a limited territorial area as the base for carrying out the greater share of their activities’ ”) and curious statistics whose origins are left unexplained (Why does Los Angeles--a city made of suburbs--not even make his top-22 list of the most “suburbanized major U.S. Cities”?).

Reminiscent of a high school geography textbook, this dry text might help explain American students’ chronic apathy toward geography. In a National Geographic Society survey conducted last year, for instance, less than 25% of first-year American college students could find Japan, Iran or other newsworthy countries when presented with a world map.