At the center of this book are three engineers and their equipages, operating in three European cities and—at least ostensibly—in direct response to urban growth in the later sixteenth century. In Toledo, London, and Paris, as elsewhere, when domestic and artisanal demands on local water supply began to outpace its availability, which often relied on insufficient, gravity-based methods, governments began to seek new solutions. Aside from opening their wallets, this also meant searching farther afield, and importing experts and engineering practices from abroad, especially from Italy and the Low Countries. The three cities in focus followed distinct paths to quenching their thirst, with markedly different outcomes. Thus, in 1571, Juanelo (Giovanni) Turriano's renowned Artificio lifted 17 cubic meters of water a day from the Tejo River to Toledo, some 100 meters upward and 300 meters laterally, while Peter Morris (a Dutchman, in all likelihood) installed, in 1582, bridgeworks that pumped around 200 cubic meters a day into London from the Thames, and, in 1604, the Fleming Jean Lintlaër's La Samaritaine relieved the Seine daily of 540 cubic meters. At least quantitively, these were significant improvements for each location.

None of these feats were performed easily or (if you'll excuse the pun) in a vacuum, as Shulman clearly and consistently stresses. After providing a synopsis of water consumption in the three cities’ regions (chapter 1), the book provides an extensive survey of hydraulic theory and practice in Western Europe since antiquity (chapter 2). Each case study then receives a chapter-length treatment (chapters 3–5), leading to a systematic comparison in the conclusion, which is also where the book's broader historiographic contours finally emerge. In terms of topography, economy, politics, administration, demography, religion, and climate, the profiled cities, not surprisingly, shared some features but not others. Crucially, however, they all served as royal capitals, and although Toledo had recently lost its place to Madrid and Paris's role had just been revitalized, all remained focal points of royal grandeur. Poignant in this respect is Shulman's demonstration of the absolutist penchant for flair and royal disregard for distributive justice. If the humbler residents of these cities gained from their masters’ investment in new technologies, it was not their direct, or even intended, result, however deeply couched monarchs’ efforts were in the rhetoric of public well-being.

Shulman also spotlights the disjuncture between royals’ (and, more generally, elites’) preoccupation with bringing water into their own compounds and their relative neglect of public-waste disposal, the two main functions of gravity-based water infrastructures prevalent earlier and elsewhere. If so, however, the neglect likely created, or at least seriously aggravated, urban hygienic conditions, which the author assumes, based on dated secondary literature, were perennially poor throughout the Middle Ages. Indeed, Three Thirsty Cities generally succumbs to an ameliorative narrative of a transition into the Renaissance, yet it hardly celebrates technological progress or seeks to tie it to religious, let alone political, transformations. The author also refuses to see innovations in water technology as a proto–Industrial Revolution, while acknowledging that the complex political economy enabling it shored up the possibility of capitalizing on water as a resource and its delivery as a monetizable service—a development that ultimately impacted rich and poor in different ways.

The book's important but belatedly stated agenda creates the impression (false though it may be) of a largely synthetic text, whose inclusion of well over 100 images results in a rather leisurely (and poorly copyedited) monograph. To some extent, Shulman's desire to provide a comprehensive backdrop to his case studies, amounting to nearly 100 pages, is understandable, yet the waterworks of Toledo, London, and Paris receive a substantial treatment for later periods as well, rendering the book's stated chronological focus a misnomer. La Samaritaine, the centerpiece of chapter 5, only begins to be built in the early seventeenth century, yet it, along with an extended retelling of its cultural reception and physical modifications, occupy more than thirty pages of text, followed by thirteen more pages on “Additional Initiatives to Solve the Water Problem in the Seventeenth Century” (268). Nonetheless, readers may enjoy the technical discussions of these machines’ creation and functioning, the tracing of their intellectual roots, and the financial and political intricacies that both promoted and undermined their accomplishments.