New Yorkers
A City and Its People in Our Time
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- €3.99
Publisher Description
Over the last 20 years, New York City has been convulsed by enormous challenges: terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, pandemic. New Yorkers is a grand portrait of the irrepressible city and a hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people. Craig Taylor spent years meeting New Yorkers - rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant - and getting them to share indelible true tales. Here are the voices of those who propel the city each day - subway conductor, nurse, bodega cashier, electrician who keeps the lights on at the top of the Empire State Building - as well as unforgettable glimpses of the city, from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade by a balloon handler to the Statue of Liberty by one of its security guards.
New Yorkers captures the strength of the city that - no matter what it goes through - dares call itself the greatest in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Taylor follows Londoners with an engrossing, multihued "oral portrait" of New York City as told by the people who live there. In conversations recorded from 2014 to 2020, 75 New Yorkers touch on themes both familiar and fresh. A blind singer who regularly walks with his seeing-eye dog from upper to lower Manhattan remembers when Times Square used to smell like "sex, groin, and hair and underarm." A nanny riffs on the trendy baby names (Whistler, Atlas) and children's activities (ukulele lessons) chosen by wealthy parents: "the threat of normalcy is so terrifying for them." Others recommend where to go for the best bagels (Absolute Bagels on 108th Street and Broadway in Manhattan) and pupusas (the El Olomega food cart in Red Hook, Brooklyn), and wonder if there will be a "mass reckoning" for the city's super-rich when they return after the Covid-19 pandemic. A curator at the Queens Museum explains how the New York City Panorama, a 9,335-square-foot architectural model built for the 1964 World's Fair, gets updated, and why museum staff decided to leave the Twin Towers standing. Expertly edited and arranged, these striking snapshots make clear that in New York, "the people are the texture." Admirers of the Big Apple will be enthralled.
