New Yorkers

November 30, 2020
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.

March 1, 2021

Taylor (Londoners) moved to New York City in January 2014, and proceeded to interview approximately 400 people who lived or worked in the city over the course of the next six years. The recorded interviews were later transcribed, and of those, 75 are published here. Although the author's personal narrative creates a framework and context for the book, its main thrust is the raw and unedited words of the people he interviewed. It could be argued that these words, taken as a whole, present a portrait of the "real lives" of people in 21st- century New York City; a city whose residents experienced the horror of 9/11, endured the hardships brought about Hurricane Sandy, and suffered extensively with the tragedy of COVID-19. This intriguing book loosely arranges into 15 sections Taylor's interviews with construction workers, building owners, nurses, salespeople, bodega workers, artists, parents of incarcerated people, people experiencing homelessness, and many others. It creates a fascinating picture of a city that can be loathed and hated, yet admired and revered at the same time. VERDICT A varied book that will appeal to armchair travelers and others curious about New York. Highly recommended for public libraries as well as large academic libraries the world over.--Steve Dixon, State Univ. of New York, Delhi

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2021
A lively portrait of a city in constant transformation. "Even if, statistically, New York was now smaller than Baoding and Tianjin and Hyderabad and many others, it still overwhelmed in its old familiar ways." So writes Canadian transplant Taylor in this fine and fearless follow-up to Londoners (2013)--fine because it's so thoughtful and revealing, fearless because the author's method is to engage strangers in conversation that quickly becomes oral history. "So, are you looking for boldface names?" asks one woman, to which another interlocutor says, "No, he's looking for the lightly italicized." No matter the typeface and/or whether rich or poor, New Yorkers have a common fixation: money. One rapper exalts, "I mean, New York, New York, man, dollar slices." If one could live on dollar slices alone, that'd be fine, but as a personal assistant to a chain of idle-rich people remarks, "The wealthy in New York--what they're buying is time and so they don't care," particularly about how others' time is spent waiting on them. A well-to-do worker in the financial sector says he wouldn't want to raise a family in the city, citing a boss who says it costs him $25,000 per month to live comfortably there. One of Taylor's subjects recounts time on Rikers Island; a blind man tells him about the smell of sex that used to pervade the air around the Port Authority bus terminal; a car thief instructs him in the art of evading police; and a sometimes-homeless man teaches him about the "three to four degrees of homelessness" that beset those down on their luck. "New York isn't a real place," complains one weary soul, while another, recently arrived from Arkansas, says, "I feel like I'm in a movie....I feel like it's going to be a happy ending." Altogether, a compelling portrait of New York and a must-read for residents and visitors alike.

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Starred review from January 1, 2021
Finding and recording a genuine sense of a city from letting just a few dozen denizens tell their stories can be daunting. Taylor did this for London (Londoners, 2011), and here repeats his project in New York City. He finds remarkable storytellers among the city's eight million residents, a diverse lot from the city's five boroughs, each borough claiming its own uniqueness. In this oral history, Taylor stands back as his subjects speak for themselves, from homeless people to the city's superrich, from recyclers to Wall Streeters. Some tales are more prosaic, reflecting on love for the city with all its challenges to everyday life. Others see more deeply. For some, 9/11 was the definitive moment of their lives: a police sergeant who sent a busload of cops south from the Bronx, fearing he'd ""just sent fifty guys to their death""; a 911 dispatcher who relayed the first calls from terrified Twin Towers' occupants. Taylor brings the record up to date with a nurse coping with dying COVID-19 patients as well as a lawyer who contracted the virus nearly fatally. No celebrities appear, just regular people who live and struggle, some quietly and heroically, in America's first city.

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