The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 31 January 2001
by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
New York City now has the history it deserves. This book is massive, sprawling, intricate, entertaining, complex and even a little infuriating, just like its subject. Gotham explores the history of this "Capital of the World" from its settlement by Native Americans through its consolidation on New Year's Day 1898. At 1236 pages, it is a daunting, literally heavy, tome, but it is written in an engaging manner that is fast-paced and fascinating. The authors have assembled a dizzying array of facts that illuminate the history of New York, and the United States. The book is a terrific overview of scholarly history, yet, despite its depth, is not a dense scholarly book. This is an excellent place to begin, where intriguing details of New York and American history come to light and invite the reader to greater exploration of the record. The book's simple end-notes of each section of each chapter, and forty-two pages of bibliographical references provide an excellent jumping-off point.
There are few topics of the city's history that are left out of this book. The authors detail the Dutch and English colonial eras, the Revolutionary period, the Civil War, and everything in between. They approach the history from a social context, and at times the book feels like a "people's history", with a vast amount of text dedicated to the social and political upheavals throughout. There are labor uprisings, political machines like Tammany Hall, racial tensions, power-grabs by the wealthy, newspaper battles, literary movements, religious revivals, tenement life, the first subway, and on and on. As the city grows, though, and spreads out, so does the text. The history sprawls, and like the city, becomes difficult to grasp in any linear sense. This is, in fact, one of the warnings the authors lay out in the introduction. Toward the end of the book, it became difficult to follow the history as many parallel stories come into play. And, this reader found himself noting the aspects of the city that he wanted to know more about, particularly its architectural history. Nevertheless, this isn't so much a drawback as the book takes on the character of the city. The array of components that make up New York would be impossible to grasp in any single work of scholarship. Also, another reviewer has commented that the book would have benefited from some kind of graphical depiction of the state of the city, periodically, throughout the book. We agree, as it would have been helpful to get a sense of the scale of development in the area and the city's demographics as they evolved through three centuries. Have a map handy as you read Gotham.
The book ends in 1898, when the four boroughs and Brooklyn unite to form one gigantic city. Another volume covering the 20th century is expected, but we cannot imagine what form it could take. The city continues to sprawl, and so does the variety of its structure. Highly recommended.
(For this book, Burrows and Wallace were awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for history.)