Book review: Stories from New York and its people that are heartwarming and harrowing
Times Square in New York City is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District
I LIVED in New York for years when young and thought I knew the place inside out. I thrived on its incredible energy and astonishing cavalcades of every type of people they make. I probed its subcultures and bars and jazz clubs, and I constantly uncovered secret gems, including my wife Jamie who I met in Central Park.
One day while walking down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn – my home borough with 53 languages spoken -- I met Muhammed Ali with an entourage of Arab kids. The most famous person on earth looked at me with my hands in Jamie’s and said, “You in love.” And I was, and even felt the same about New York. But years later after reading Craig Taylor’s New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time I am wondering whether I missed many things. Taylor corrals under one roof so many of the remarkable characters who populate “the city that never sleeps” that it amazes me anew. Somehow the author blends scores of marvellous human stories, told in each individual’s own words, into a kind of magnificent chorus of human striving, which sometimes swells to an absolute crescendo in New York. If you wish, it’s easy flip around to what most appeals.
