JAN MORRIS HAS written more than two dozen volumes on various cities, from Hong Kong to Venice to Manhattan, and in City to City, she turns her keen but kind eye on 10 Canadian cities, from an outsider`s perspective. It is precisely that outsider`s viewpoint that is Morris`s strength. As Peter Jukes wrote in A Shout in the Street: An Excursion into the Modem City: "Newcomers reconstruct the city, not simply by renewing it with their muscle and skill, but also emotionally and intellectually" If nothing else, Morris uses both muscle and skill to bring our cities home to us in fresh and entertaining ways. Many of these essays first appeared in Saturday Night and Toronto magazines, and when they did some critics argued that Morris wasn`t being fair. How could she write about Edmonton when she spent, by her own admission, only six days in that city? What could this Welsh woman, a mere journalist, tell Canadians about Yellowknife? In fact, she can tell us a lot, and her essays offer us far more about who we are and where we come from, and who we may one day be, than any governmentally appointed committee ever could. Morris clearly cares about this country and our future. As she put it in an interview in the Toronto Star: There is almost nowhere in Canada, even in the Manhattan of Toronto, where 1 feel for a moment that 1 am on American soil. It is not merely that the terrain is different. It is a much deeper difference in manners, in attitudes, and, 1 think, in values. It is just those manners, attitudes, and values that Morris explores in her essays, and while she doesn`t love everything about the country, the book is an inspiring journey in itself, far more than a travel book. As she explains,1 resent being thought of as someone who writes about journeys - which I don`t .... MY work is a protracted anthropological study of myself ... All it purports to do is express one persons reactions to situations.... Subjective it is, and from one persons perspective, but Morris can open our eyes. Consider, for instance, her response to hearing, in Toronto the word "multiculturalism," a word we hear so often and know so well, that we could barely begin to understand the way Morris explains it to us: Multiculturalism! 1 had never heard the word before, but I was certainly to hear it again, for it turned out to be the key word, SO to speak, to contemporary Toronto. As oo-la-la is to Paris, and ciao to Rome, and nyet to Moscow, and hey you`re looking great to Manhattan, so multiculturalism is to Toronto. Morris found St. John`s, Newfoundland, "the most entertaining town in North America,...a family city, meshed with internecine plot, but still somewhat reluctantly united by blood, history and common experience..."; but she`s also not afraid to point out that "beneath the charm there lies a bitterness," that "St. John`s is full of disappointment." Nor does she hesitate to confess the ways in which cities subvert her very nature, as in the way St. Andrews, New Brunswick, seduced her: My every instinct is hostile to nostalgia, conservatism, the status quo, pedigree, royalty, and all good-old-days rubbish. I think the kilted youths at the Algonquin [in St. Andrews, New Brunswick] look simply silly (like all Canadians in kilts, they are the wrong shape), and I despise all the name-dropping and what in less genteel burghs than St. Andrews they call arse-licking. Yet something about this little place corrupted me. The truth was, 1 liked it all. Each of the essays begins with a short introduction as some of them, in particular the piece on Montreal written in 1987, are slightly out of date, politically speaking. But in the long run, Morris`s perspective is timeless, and more than sympathetic. Perhaps that sympathy comes from the question she always asks herself. Unlike "John Gunther, the great American reporter, [who] used to ask of any city he visited: `Who runs this place?` I myself usually ask, `Who ought to feel sorry for this town?"` We cannot help but learn something from Morris, even if she makes us uneasy, as she will. She didn`t love Vancouver (but doesn`t everyone?) and, she notes: Canada is permanent compromise, it seems to me ... One thinks of Canadians as reserved by nature, but perhaps it is instinct, not temperament, that keeps all things in this country, great and small, so generally even and controlled. One of her finest details, the detail of the sort that only a writer with a sense of humour, a keen eye, and a generous heart would see and note is in the essay on Toronto. At a skating rink near City Hall she notes a sign: "Hours of Operation. Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. until 10 p.m. Sunday, 9 a.m. until 10 p.m" "What`s that again?" she asks. Aldous Huxley once wrote, "People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it" Morris is surely one of the best travellers and chroniclers of literary travels in town whatever the town.