Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (The History of NYC Series)

Rating:
Summary: Immense!
Review: Doing research for a screenplay. While the WWW provided bits and pieces, "Gotham," provided some well researched facts that I needed. If you're interested in the history of the Big Apple, this book is definitely worth a look.

Rating:
Summary: If you love New York, you'll love GOTHAM.
Review: As early as the preface authors Burrows and Wallace dispel the legend that the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Indians for $24. For just twice that you, lucky reader, can own this behemoth (1383 pages) which teems with nearly as many characters as does the city itself. GOTHAM is history is the old-fashioned narrative style, a rich story colorfully told. If you're going to invest in one book this season for your library, you could do a lot worse and I doubt that you could do much better than to place GOTHAM on your bookshelves.

Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT! FABULOUS! WONDERFUL! AMAZING! SUPERB!
Review: This is by far the best book ever written that documents the history of New York. This is a book you must have on your bookshelf!

Rating:
Summary: makes new york come alive,a great holiday gift.
Review: This book makes you realize what a great city this is and what its meant to our country.It belongs in your own library.

Rating:
Summary: If you want to learn about the most important city on earth
Review: the authors have a love affair with this great city and now so do I.This book should have a permament place in everyone's library.I would highly recommend GOTHAM as a holiday gift.

Rating:
Summary: Great Giant Tome for a Great Giant Town
Review: Gotham is a significant achievement as a work of history. The beauty of this book is that, despite its length, it is engrossing and very readable all the way through. Indeed, the last 100 pages are as interesting if not more interesting than the first 100 pages. Rich with interesting anecdotes, and a cast of dozens of characters and true stories that are as colorful as the fiction in any Dickens novel, it is a rewarding read, albiet a somewhat challenging one if only because of its 1236 pages of text. Particularly interesting are the sections on the New Amsterdam period, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, including the Draft Riots, crime, the development of Wall Street and the Stock Exchange, Boss Tweed, the Brooklyn Bridge, transportation and the rail boom, electric lighting, the Astor Place riot, fire companies, immigration, the Astors, Teddy Roosevelt, Coney Island, the skyscraper and building booms,... and the list goes on and on. This is not just a history of New York, but also a history essential to understanding America's past. The book is an enriching read, and heartily recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Vast, but definitive?
Review: Nobody can deny that this is a mammoth work of scholarship deserving of praise, but before you dive into this one with determination and zeal you should know a few things. First, despite what others are saying about the book, it does NOT read like a novel. It's narrative history to be sure, but it's also full of numbers, dates, figures, statistics and other analytical details which make the thing feel far more academic than is frequently suggested or expected. Also, the authors greatly emphasize the political and (especially) commercial history of the city, sometimes to the neglect of cultural matters. This huge and allegedly definitive book is largely and conspicuously absent of substantive references to Columbia University, for example. Are the authors suggesting that Columbia is not an institution deserving of our more focused attention? In this way, the book is quite different from Kevin Starr's treatment of California history, largely as a history of its institutions. Commercial and political institutions get many pages, but important cultural institutions are sadly neglected.

Rating:
Summary: I Love New York
Review: It is much easier in life to find fault and to be critical: one can point to specifics, and be relentless. It is harder to praise. So I find myself praising this work in cliche superlatives: it is a great book, wonderfully absorbing, fascinating, "well put together" (as New Yorkers say about smartly dressed women), and entertaining. And it is accessible without being dumbed down - so have your dictionary handy. I do have two minor criticisms, however. First, the absence of sufficient maps and provision in the table of contents for maps, which caused me to constantly flip around to what few maps there are, often leaving me lost and confused in unfamiliar parts of the city. Second, the book is unwieldy. Hopefully the next segment - 1898 to the present - for which I can't wait - will be easier to cart around.

Rating:
Summary: I thought the Pulitzer was for good writing....
Review: Compellingly written social history of what my Korean friends jokingly call "a country in itself." The breadth and depth of this narrative gives weight to that description -- Burrows and Wallace present details and facts mingled with a sense of what it was like to live in the city. The book's strength is the effortless weaving of customs and lifestyles of notables and the less famous within the more salient factual material. For anyone who loves the city or a well-written single volume history. David R. Bannon, Ph.D.; author "Race Against Evil."

Rating:
Summary: Excellent social narrative
Review: Burrows and Wallace have put together an excellent narrative of the social history of New York City. They relay the events from the first European discovery of Manhattan to the unification of the Five Burroughs with clarity and concision.