标题: 2022.07.27 读什么书才能了解纽约 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-29 23:42 标题: 2022.07.27 读什么书才能了解纽约 The Economist reads | The Big Apple
What to read to understand New York
Our New York reporter picks four books and a documentary as the essential guide to America’s greatest city
Blick vom Rockefeller Center auf Manhatten, USA, New York City, Engl.: night shot, view from Rockefeller Center to Manhatten, New York City, USA, FOR SALE IN: UK ONLY.
Jul 27th 2022
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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover “The Economist reads” guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.
It does not take much to be a New Yorker. You don’t have to be born there, nor even to live there for long. Just move there. You will need to find a go-to bodega in order to feel at home. And you must learn how to say “not for nothing” in the right context. Much of this should come easy. Perhaps because New York serves as a character in so many film and television series, many people feel they know the great city even from a distance. In reality people, and that includes Gothamites, probably know less than they are letting on. Read these four books, and watch one documentary, however, and you’ll get a good grasp of why New York is the way it is.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. By Robert Caro. Knopf; 1,296 pages; $22.99. Vintage; £25
During the covid-19 pandemic, in one broadcast video call after another New York’s politicians and journalists appeared with Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” visible on their bookshelves. They may have been hoping to show that, as readers of the 1,296-page tome, they understood the city’s politics and how its government works. Published in 1974 and meticulously researched by Mr Caro, the book offers a detailed profile of Robert Moses, who held many positions simultaneously in municipal and state government. Never elected, but more powerful than most politicians, Moses reshaped the city and its surrounding region in the 20th century by building bridges, tunnels, roads, public housing and beaches. That didn’t come cheap, especially for the poor. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were forced to move. Whole neighbourhoods were sliced off from the rest of the city by new motorways. The impact of this is still being felt. Last year Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman from the Bronx, called the Cross Bronx Expressway, devised by Moses over 70 years ago, “both literally and metaphorically a structure of racism”.
Greater than Ever: New York’s Big Comeback. By Daniel Doctoroff. PublicAffairs; 400 pages; $28 and £25
For decades after Robert Moses, big projects were not on the agenda. That changed after the attacks of September 11th 2001. Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire media mogul, was elected mayor even as the 16-acre pit, the remains of the destroyed Twin Towers, still burned. He and Daniel Doctoroff, his deputy mayor for economic development, used the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan as a catalyst for rethinking the functioning of the city more widely. “Greater than Ever” chronicles that transformation and how redevelopment radiated outwards from the World Trade Centre, to Tribeca, Chelsea, the High Line and eventually to previously neglected and more distant neighbourhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Almost half of the city was re-zoned, which helped to spur economic growth. Not everywhere has flourished, and critics grumble that many people lost out to gentrification. Read the memoir and you wonder how Mr Doctoroff might have fared had he been mayor himself.
The Island at the Centre of the World By Russell Shorto. Knopf; 384 pages; £16.95
Most American schoolkids learn that Peter Minuit, a Dutch colonist, bought the island of Manhattan from Native Americans in 1626 for goods supposedly worth $24. To know more about Manhattan’s earliest days as a Dutch colony, read “The Island at the Centre of the World”, a gripping, witty history. “Right from the start”, Mr Shorto writes, the residents of Nieuw Amsterdam were ambitious, polyglot, upwardly mobile, religiously tolerant (well, mostly), with mixed ethnicities and set on founding a centre of free trade. The same traits are evident in New York today. Peter Stuyvesant, who led the colony when the British took over, insisted on what are known as the “Articles of Capitulation”, a guarantee of rights and freedoms unparalleled in any English colony. These rights were later written into the city charter and had an effect well beyond Manhattan. A century later, New York State (and a few others) demanded that the new federal government add a Bill of Rights to the constitution.
Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. By Kim Phillips-Fein. Picador; 432 pages; $22
How quickly will New York bounce back from the lingering economic effects of the pandemic, if at all? Many office buildings remain half empty and shops unoccupied. Graffiti and squeegee men, panhandling car windscreen-washers, are reappearing. Crime is on the rise. Could New York now face a period like the 1970s when manufacturing decline hit the city, the population dwindled and confidence generally fell? New York took 25 years to recover from that. Then, with tax revenues low, budget cuts in the city—as outlined by Ms Phillips-Fein in “Fear City”—only made the situation worse. Those austerity measures helped bring the city to the brink of bankruptcy. They serve as a warning of what not to do in the face of a new threat.
More Summer reads
• The perfectionism trap
• Finding yourself in the rivers, lakes and ponds of England
• The world’s most liveable cities
• Our Bartleby columnist picks beach reads for business folk
• Malala Yousafzai explains why girls must be free to learn—and to lead
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Disney Plus and Hulu (2021)
Upstaged by Woodstock in upstate New York, the Harlem Music Festival was almost lost to time. For six Sundays in that same summer of 1969, in what is now called Marcus Garvey Park, 300,000 people heard the likes of B.B. King, the 5th Dimension, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone. Some of it was televised, all of it filmed, but it was never shown in cinemas until last year. As well as the music, it is mesmerising to watch the scenes of the crowd singing and dancing. Questlove whittled 40 hours of footage down to a powerfully joyous two-hour masterpiece. The documentary won numerous awards, including an Oscar. As much as it is about the music, Questlove has said, it is also about “black erasure”. African-American culture and artists have often been minimised, ignored or dismissed. For decades the footage languished in a basement. Questlove has saved an important moment in American—and not only black—culture. ■
Read more stories about New York, including How, after 9/11, New York built back better, how Eric Adams, its newish mayor, is tackling violence and how graffiti is making a come-back in the Big Apple.
经济学人》读后感 | 大苹果
读什么书才能了解纽约
我们的纽约记者挑选了四本书和一部纪录片，作为了解美国最伟大城市的基本指南。
Blick vom Rockefeller Center auf Manhatten, USA, New York City, Engl.: Night shot, view from Rockefeller Center to Manhatten, New York City, USA, for sale in: 仅限英国。
2022年7月27日
