Huffington Post Says : " F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great American Novel places New York at the epicenter of the Jazz Age. Glamorous, amoral, insouciant and materialistic, Gatsby and his entourage embodied the best and worst of New York City, both then and now."
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Huffington Post says : "Beginning with the famous 1951 baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, DeLillo's post-modern work goes on to intertwine historical events from the next 50 years into a sprawling opus that may not take place entirely in New York, but locates the city in a complex social and historical context."
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Huffington Post says : "Chabon's 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winner ranges from one New York iconic location to another, from the Empire State Building (where one of the protagonists takes up residence) to the site of the 1939 World's Fair. The novel also deals with comic books, although more in-depth than Lethem's work, and highlights the Jewish experience before and directly after World War II in New York. American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis called it "one of the three great books of my generation."
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Huffington Post says : "Speaking of Mr. Ellis, his novel American Psycho provided a satirical take on late 80s/early 90s New York. Protagonist Patrick Bateman is a wealthy "yuppie," working a an investment firm and engaged to be married. Underneath, he is revealed to have no inner life, and his absolute devotion to appearances allows him to be cruel and unfeeling, a comment on the unrestrained greed of the late 80s New York financial community that strikes a familiar chord today".
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Huffington post says : "From the Central Park Zoo to the Natural history Museum to nay number of down and out street corners, Holden Caulfield’s two days in New York showcase the possibilities and frustrations of New York City. Drunk, lonely and full of angst, Holden Caulfield manifests the frustrations of many a New Yorker in J.D. Salinger's classic."
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Huffington Post says : "Set on Brooklyn’s Dean Street, the semi-autobiographical coming of age novel tackles issues of gentrification and race relations through the unlikely friendship of two boys united by a love of comic books and handball. Jonathan Lethem’s ambitious novel, which also works in references to comic books and the music of 70s and 80s New York, has quickly become a favorite among the Brooklyn literati."
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Huffington Post says : "The Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, now a hotbed of gentrification but once a stronghold of struggling immigrant communities, is the setting for this widely beloved bildungsroman. Protagonist Francie Nolan, growing up in the tenements as the daughter of a janitor, struggles to build a better life for herself against the obstacles of pre-War New York."
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NYT says : "Stock broker Sherman McCoy's nightmare detour onto the mean streets of the South Bronx sets the stage for this apocalyptic caricature of greed and its consequences in 1980's New York. Mr. Wolfe's novel of the city of ambition was inspired by vivid extremes between poverty and wealth -- extremes that so widened that by the end of the decade the income gap in Manhattan was even greater than in Guatemala.
"The period was so much like the 1920's in that it became perfectly O.K. to flaunt wealth," Mr. Wolfe has said. He was prescient: the stock market collapse sent McCoy's colleagues reeling (although, despite his travails, McCoy still made a killing when he had to dispose of his Park Avenue apartment), and race dominated city politics (note the election of David N. Dinkins in 1989 as the city's first black mayor).
The morality play was rife with insights: the lunacy of a restaurant that took no reservations and kept patrons waiting in their limousines for a table, or the populist verdicts that elevated some criminals to folk heroes. "In a civil case," Mr. Wolfe wrote, "a Bronx jury is a vehicle for redistributing the wealth."
His research produced characters whose identities were so thinlyveiled (a judge patterned after Justice Burton Roberts and a lawyer after Edward Hayes) that they publicly basked in their fictional roles. "
Huffington Post says : "om Wolfe's 1987 satire of New York greed and racial tensions was originally published serially in Rolling Stone magazine. Wolfe used the book to pillory archetypal characters of 1980s New York, including Sherman McCoy, a millionaire bond trader, and Reverend Bacon, a coldly scheming political activist."
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Huffington Post says : "Truman Capote's 1958 novel was a valentine to a romantic New York and its bohemian inhabitants, immortalized by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film adaptation."
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Huffington Post says : "Edith Wharton’s New York was a world away from our own, filled with starched collars and prudish morals that created an insulated, static society that deadened its inhabitants. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, the first woman to do so, Wharton wrote with an insider’s eye about the customs and confusions of 1800’s New York."
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Huffington Post says : "Henry Roth's 1930's chronicle of the Jewish immigrant experience was largely neglected until it was reissued in the 1960's. Lis Harris, writing in The New Yorker, called it "Arguably the most distinguished work of fiction ever written about immigrant life."
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Huffington Post : "Henry James, who was born on New York's Washington Square, wrote this novel about the societal conventions and familial relationships of late 1880's New York. Based on the relationship between the overbearing Dr. Austin Sloper and his simple daughter Catherine, the book was based on a true story related to James by a friend."
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Huffington Post says : "Unlike Capote's romantic New York of the 1950s, James Baldwin's Greenwich Village was a hotbed of sexual taboos and desperation. Baldwin, who grew up in Harlem but eventually expatriated to France, focused on themes of interracial and bisexual love in the novel, mirroring his own experience living in Greenwich Village as a black homosexual".
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NYT says : "This brutally honest autobiography of a black man growing up in Harlem during the 1940's and 1950's is a scorching profile in survival against the odds. Each petty crime, each brush with brutality, each encounter with the pimps and junkies who inhabit his world poses the book's underlying question: How did Claude Brown survive?
"Manchild" is dedicated to Eleanor Roosevelt and to the Wiltwyck School she founded for troubled youngsters, but he explains that he was ultimately saved only because he decided to save himself from a society of lost souls.
Reciting a litany of rebellion against the white establishment, he wrote: "I was rebelling every time I went to some place like the Children's Center, like the Youth House, like Wiltwyck, like Warwick. I was rebelling, man. And all I met in there were other young, rebellious cats who couldn't take it either.
"But nobody was winning. That revolution was hopeless. The cats who had something on the ball and they could dig it in time, they stopped. They stopped. They didn't stop being angry. They just stopped cutting their own throats."
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NYT says : " Theodore H. White coined the phrase. Robert Moses personified it. And Robert A. Caro appropriated it as the title of his epic biography of the man who, perhaps more than any single individual in this century, changed the face of New York.
The book is a compelling rejoinder to prevailing cynicism that it makes no difference who wins because the rest of us lose anyway. "The Power Broker" spares no one, the press included, in its searing, if often one-sided, analysis of how Moses parlayed a series of seemingly obscure appointive jobs in city and state government (chairman of the State Power Authority and of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, among others) into an empire that overwhelmed mayors and governors.
He practiced bulldozer diplomacy that, even as it created an impressive network of parks and highways, destroyed stable neighborhoods and accelerated middle-class flight to the undeveloped suburbs. Beyond the physical legacy, accomplished in an era unfettered by environmental laws and other legal impediments, was a political one: The popular backlash against his arrogance all but guaranteed that no successor would be granted the same leeway as the single-minded man whose favorite aphorism was, "If the ends don't justify the means, what does?"
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NYT says : "Generational conflict, Irving Howe wrote in his richly anecdotal narrative of the assimilation of Eastern European Jewry, is "central to the experiences of all immigrant groups." Similarly, conflict over ethnic succession has been central to the metamorphosis of New York. Mr. Howe's history, which closes with the equally seismic shift to the suburbs, helps the reader understand both conflicts.
His book helps preserves a vanishing culture. Some of it has been absorbed into the New York idiom, just as every immigrant group before and since has contributed flavor to the ethnic stew. Other aspects of that culture, from the icons of the Yiddish theater to the suffering of Lower East Side mothers deserted by their husbands, have been all but forgotten, and bear remembering.
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Israel Zangwill perpetrated the "melting pot" myth in his turn-of-the-century play of the same name. No book did more to destroy the myth than "Beyond the Melting Pot." Professors Glazer and Moynihan deconstructed the notion that successive waves of immigrants were seamlessly absorbed into a homogenized whole, declaring instead that "ethnicity was the organizing unit of New York politics."
If some of their judgments seem too sweeping, they made a compelling case for each and for the role of political parties in assimilating successive groups of immigrants.
"The classic heterogeneity of great cities has been limited to the elite part of the population," they wrote, but "the heterogeneity of New York is of the masses." Even after the book was updated in 1970, Professor Glazer lamented that he had been laboring under a "New York illusion" that American-born blacks would replicate the immigrant experience and graduate from the ghetto. Ethnic identity, he said, "is pretty thin gruel compared to race."
Less durable was their assessment of Italian-Americans, whose cultural and social style, they said, produced attractive families, friendships and neighborhoods, though "somehow the ethos has not gone beyond that to create a presumption of leadership in city affairs."
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NYt says : "Don't expect to find Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 49th Street, where this book says it is. This guide to 1930's New York is valuable as evidence of how much the city has changed in 60 years and how much has not. It is filled with history, trivia and insights that reduce the city to human scale.
The collaborators viewed their challenge as keeping pace "with a dynamic metropolis that overnight replaces a century-old institution with a new triumph to modernity." But William H. Whyte suggests that the guide was "more a precious document to be preserved than a packet of information to be updated."
Of the old Madison Square Garden, it revealed: "On a good night, patrons eat 12,000 hot dogs, washed down with 1,000 gallons of beer and soda pop, while 60 private policemen, unarmed, are stationed there to prevent disorder."
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NYT says : "Diane Ravitch wrote this comprehensive account only five years after New York was riven by yet another school war -- this one pitting a predominantly white teachers' union against parents, mostly black or Hispanic, who demanded a greater voice in the politics of education.
The book lacks stridency; it provides solid perspective on a series of conflicts that she traced to a school war between the Protestant establishment and immigrant Irish Catholics, which ultimately led to the establishment of a Board of Education and of a decentralized system that was vulnerable to abuse by ward bosses. So much for panaceas, whether invoked for the first time in the 19th century or reinvented in the 20th. And so much for education, which, perpetually, seems to have played a subordinate role to politics.
Still, the author remained optimistic, maintaining that the "effort to advance comity -- (that basic recognition of differences in values and interests and of the desirability of reconciling those differences peacefully) -- has always been at the heart of public education."
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NYT says : "Complete with a glossary of slang and Spanish terms, this gritty autobiographical account of growing up in East Harlem cries out plaintively: "I'm here, and I want recognition." And a way out.
Mr. Thomas's mean streets are the ghetto and he is no dispassionate tour guide (so vivid are his accounts that the book was banned by a school district in Flushing, Queens). His itinerary includes the underside of El Barrio's rooftops and barrooms, its low life and the convicts he befriends and his fears in the prison where he served six years for armed robbery. Mr. Thomas's account may seem dated, even stereotypical. But his pain and lack of self-pity resonate in an enduring struggle for social mobility and against the siren call of quick cures. "The worlds of home and school were made up of rules laid down by adults who had forgotten the feeling of what it means to be a kid but expected a kid to remember to be an adult -- something he hadn't gotten to yet," Mr. Thomas wrote. "The world of street belonged to the kid alone. There he could earn his own rights, prestige, his good-o stick of living. It was like being a knight of old, like being 10 feet tall."
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NYT says : "This slender volume is a classic of simplicity and grace, a love poem to a city where no one should come to live, White wrote, "unless he is willing to be lucky."
It is a timeless book that casually examines the three New Yorks, of the native-born, the commuter, and the out-of-towner, and concludes, reassuringly given the grousing more than four decades later, that "the city has never been so uncomfortable, so crowded, so tense."
In his foreword, White wrote that much had changed even in the few months since he had written his ode. "I wrote not only during a heat wave but during a boom. The heat has broken, the boom has broken, and New York is not quite so feverish now as when the piece was written. The Lafayette Hotel, mentioned in passing, has passed despite the mention. But the essential fever of New York has not changed in any particular, and I have not tried to make revisions in the hope of bringing the thing down to date. "To bring New York down to date," he wrote, "a man would have to be published with the speed of light."
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