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Over a period of six years, the author, Craig Taylor, met with, interviewed and be-friended scores of New York residents from all walks of life – each of them eager to share their slice of New York City with us. The resulting book, “New Yorkers, A City and Its People in our Time”, is a fascinating literary mosaic of dozens of unique and intimate musings collected and distilled for us into one wonderful volume.
Some of the characters we meet include a security guard at the Statue of Liberty, a city roadworks engineer trying to hold back the tide on crumbling streets and Infrastructure, and a COVID patient admitted to a NY hospital in the height of the earliest pandemic days.
We meet some of the homeless, the poverty-stricken, a criminal, a lawyer, the militant, a cop, a 911 dispatcher and several social justice seekers; as well as nannies, tutors, interior designers and others trying to eke out a living at the hands of a city which has evolved into a “playground for the rich”, or as some see it, the “violently or aggressively wealthy”.
Several of the stories involve young people arriving from midwestern or southern states, – artists, actors, journalists, singers – creative hopefuls caught up in the dream, the “generosity of opportunities”, the theatrical loudness and the “great bigness” of everything NY.
Across it all, the voices we hear are alternately strident, empathetic, assertive, intelligent, kind, angry, reflective, uncompromising and many are fiercely proud of their borough and their city – in short, every and all characteristics you would expect to find in the population of any huge metropolitan area. What makes this collection cohesive then, is not what these individuals have in common, so much as what they don’t.
If it wasn’t clear beforehand, its certainly clear after losing yourself to this totally engrossing collection of characters – New York City, as evidenced in this book, pulsates with an inexhaustible, fluid, larger-than-life energy which feeds on diversity – the outcome evident in an ever-widening cacophony of city living, an “assault on the senses”, that, love it or hate it, is impossible for an individual to ignore.
A big thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for an advance review copy in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts presented are my own.
