New York City has seen nearly a billion inhabitants in its 400 year long history, and a great many of them have been very remarkable. But there are also many how had an indelible impact on the city, even if they are mostly forgotten today.
I do not like New York City. I am a Bostonian through and through. But I’ve been there many times, and I must admit that there is really no other place like it. The city has a strange essence to it, and some kind of hold over the imagination. As such, I was excited to explore its history through the biographies of thirty-one people who left their mark on the city.
The author discusses a wide variety of people who sprawl across race, socioeconomic class, profession, and the centuries with wild abandon. I enjoyed learning about this multitude of sometimes eccentric, mostly forgotten, but always impactful individuals and how they shaped the city. Roberts answered many questions I never knew I had, such as who had created Central Park, who united the boroughs into a single metropolitan area, and who came up with the idea of time zones and why.
However, I did feel that the chapters could have better arranged, because we bounce back and forth in subject and themes and sometimes chronology in a rather haphazard fashion. I would have also liked it if the author spent more time discussing the common thread through the stories, helped us follow how we went from this development to the next – while Roberts does point out how some figures tie together, it was difficult to place them all within the same framework. I also thought that sometimes the information presented in some chapters was misbalanced, with too much discussing the context of the times and too little about the person at the center of the section.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.
