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Outstanding
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Library Journal Ravi Shenoy
Utterly fascinating. Essential for anyone wishing to understand present-day Mumbai. [15 Sept 2004, p.72]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
[Mehta's] sophisticated voice conveys postmodern Bombay with a carefully calibrated balance of wit and outrage, harking back to such great Victorian urban chroniclers as Dickens and Mayhew.
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Outstanding
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Los Angeles Times Shashi Tharoor
Stunning... [Mehta] explores the underside of the city with the inquisitiveness of a voyeur, the sensibility of a poet and the zeal of a private investigator. Mehta is none of those things and yet, like the best writers, he is all of them. [26 Sept 2004, p.R2]
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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Anosh Irani
Undoubtedly one of the most important books ever written on Bombay. It is brave and insightful, one man's love affair with a ruined city. Perhaps it is fitting that Mehta's family was in the diamond business. He has produced a gem. [23 Oct 2004, p.D20]
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Outstanding
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New York Review Of Books Pankaj Mishra
Mehta mostly follows a contemporary journalistic convention in which the reporter effaces his own personality and opinions in order to amplify the voices of the people he meets. He reproduces with remarkable fidelity what he sees and hears.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Akash Kapur
Giving depth and shading to such a complex subject, Maximum City is narrative reporting at its finest, probably the best work of nonfiction to come out of India in recent years.
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Outstanding
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Village Voice Uday Benegal
[A] remarkable collection of stories.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Salil Tripathi
Remarkable... In these pages, densely packed with facts, observations, vignettes and insights, he brings the city alive with love, longing and sadness in a way never accomplished in non-fiction.
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Outstanding
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The Nation Amitava Kumar
This fidelity to his interlocutors, and to their detail and circumstance, as much as the intelligence and brightness of Mehta's own prose, makes Maximum City an extraordinary debut--a debut that will rival Arundhati Roy's in fiction.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Soumya Bhattacharya
The research that has gone into this book is phenomenal. [Mehta] places his enthusiastic and intrepid self at the centre of his narrative and weaves a squalid, glittering, courageous, spectacular, grotesque, redemptive tapestry of stories.
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Outstanding
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The Economist
A remarkable documentary of life in India's largest city.
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Favorable
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PopMatters C.W. Thompson
Mehta has a historian's sense of timeline and a sociologist's depth of context and because of this, Maximum City is a fully realized book, at times drawn-out, but always influenced by the next relationship that Mehta endures. He is able to keep track of the larger context of Bombay through his interviews and encounters: a city of contradictions, and his inspiration.
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Favorable
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The New Yorker
Mehta’s brutal portrait of urban life derives its power from intimacy with his subjects.
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Favorable
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Booklist Alan Moores
The subjects are skewed toward the author's journalistic brief, but with those limitations, Mehta delivers a fresh and unblinking look at contemporary Bombay. [15 Sept 2004, p.197]
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Though this overlong work could stand to shed a few pounds itself, it's rich with insight and unfailingly well-written.
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Thrity Umrigar
But for all its fascinating details, it is hard to imagine the appeal of this book to an American reader who is unfamiliar with Bombay. Much of it has an inside-baseball feel to it. Early on, Mehta makes clear that he is only perfunctorily interested in examining his evolving feelings toward the city that has haunted his imagination for so long.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Siddhartha Deb
Mehta is often content to let details accumulate when the reader wants interpretation, and when the details have reached a critical mass that even he can no longer ignore, he tends to lapse into weak arguments about cities, culture or society.
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Unfavorable
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The Spectator Daniel Neill
The book, meanwhile, reflects its author’s dubious moral judgment, veering between a rigorous critical analysis of the city’s evils and an uncritical engagement (even, at times, complicity) with them.
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