Take a photo of a barcode or cover
beeostrowsky 's review for:
New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time
by Craig Taylor
As dizzying a spectacle as the city itself, Craig Taylor’s NEW YORKERS is a fixed record of the fleeting present, a curated selection of those numberless “stories in the Big City”. If you’ve scrolled through Humans of New York, you’ll relish the chance to get beyond the photos. Some stories stand me in awe of the city, and some of them make me very glad I don't live there. People make their living getting nits and lice out of people's hair because the pests have evolved to resist remedies that work elsewhere—no thank you! But maintaining a midcentury World’s Fair scale model of the entire city in a Queens museum? That sounds like a fascinating job.
You’ll meet homeless New Yorkers, and you’ll meet an elevator repairman who has seen how many empty spaces the city holds, enough to house everyone in the city, except the landlords are trying to keep up their reputation by keeping the rents too high to fill the building.
You’ll meet, one after the other, a “cop” who prides himself on not being a “police officer” (his badly-motivated co-workers), and then a trans Latina who sees the whole NYPD as a lethal danger to her and a lot of other people, unaccountable to any real justice—and then a far-right militia member who makes excuses for old racists and says “a black” shot his friend.
You’ll meet a personal injury lawyer who waxes rhapsodic about arranging for the author to accidentally trip and fall over an officially documented crack in the sidewalk, and how eloquently he would describe the author’s face as maimed, tragically disfigured!, you know, hypothetically. You’ll meet the mother of a man who’s incarcerated at Rikers Island, and an ex-con who did time there, and a car thief who’s still on the outside.
NEW YORKERS is only a tiny sample of the fascinating lives in New York City, of course. But that’s all the more reason to savor every story. I did. And I can tell you, if I ever get up to New York City again, I’m gonna savor every slice on a Scott’s Pizza Tour (Chapter 8, “Life is a Parade”). That’s a thing that exists in New York. Because of course it does. It’s New York.
I am grateful to NetGalley for a free advance copy.
You’ll meet homeless New Yorkers, and you’ll meet an elevator repairman who has seen how many empty spaces the city holds, enough to house everyone in the city, except the landlords are trying to keep up their reputation by keeping the rents too high to fill the building.
You’ll meet, one after the other, a “cop” who prides himself on not being a “police officer” (his badly-motivated co-workers), and then a trans Latina who sees the whole NYPD as a lethal danger to her and a lot of other people, unaccountable to any real justice—and then a far-right militia member who makes excuses for old racists and says “a black” shot his friend.
You’ll meet a personal injury lawyer who waxes rhapsodic about arranging for the author to accidentally trip and fall over an officially documented crack in the sidewalk, and how eloquently he would describe the author’s face as maimed, tragically disfigured!, you know, hypothetically. You’ll meet the mother of a man who’s incarcerated at Rikers Island, and an ex-con who did time there, and a car thief who’s still on the outside.
NEW YORKERS is only a tiny sample of the fascinating lives in New York City, of course. But that’s all the more reason to savor every story. I did. And I can tell you, if I ever get up to New York City again, I’m gonna savor every slice on a Scott’s Pizza Tour (Chapter 8, “Life is a Parade”). That’s a thing that exists in New York. Because of course it does. It’s New York.
I am grateful to NetGalley for a free advance copy.