New York Calling

Reviews / Votes

. . . often revealing and almost always poignant . . . punctuated with perceptive observations about life in a city with todays new norms. * Sam Roberts, <i>New York Times</i> * With Rudy running for President and Hilly Kristal dead, the timing couldnt be better for New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg. This fascinating, enlightening and sometimes irritating collection of essays pokes through the rubble of the past three decades and asks: What is the Apple without its worms - without its grifters, goombahs, B-boys, bohos and bums? Beginning in 1977 - with the Bronx burning and Times Square a septic tank of despair - the book endeavors to trace the path to todays squeegee-free, Disney boomtown. * <i>Time Out</i>, New York * a mind-opening collection . . . Through the lens of New York politics, music, art and counterculture, we hear several, often fascinating takes on essentially the same story: how the squalor, struggles, crime, drugs, and free expression of the 1970s and 1980s gave way to a cleaner and safer city in the subsequent two decades, but one in which commercial development has often trumped, protecting existing residents and preserving a rich past . . . the essays, whether read discretely or as a complete work, offer a near unforgettable impression of an era. * Jason Warshof, <i>Financial Times</i> * Original essay collections are landmines of missed opportunity - nobodys perfect every time, and assigning editors are stuck with what theyre handed. So the success ratio is miraculous here as writers of vastly varying celebrity weigh in on the fate of teeming, polyglot New York City in a rich-get-richer world. For once all five boroughs are accounted for, and a heartening proportion of the contributors still find hope in a place where almost no one under forty can afford the rent. Readable, intelligent, and full of facts not even Marshall Berman knew. * Robert Christgau * Gothams a Rip Van Winkle city. Always has been. In 1856, Harpers Monthly claimed New York is never the same city for a dozen years together, and that after forty years a visitor would find nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew. But even Rip would be flabbergasted had he fallen asleep in the 1977 blackout and woken up today. New York Callings perceptive reports and evocative reminiscences vividly recreate the all but vanished city of the70s - dangerous, broke, aflame, in ruins, but also hip, vital, creative, rebellious - and trace the astonishing transformations wrought over the intervening decades. By turns tender and irate, whimsical and reflective, its a great guide to Gothams recent history. * Mike Wallace, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning <i>Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898</i> and Founder, Gotham Center for New York City History * New York Calling gives us the New York that doesnt get into the guidebooks - or the history books. With tour guides like Luc Sante, Tom Robbins, and editors Berman and Berger, we can count on an eye-opening journey through a more rough and tumble city, full of problems but bursting with messy life. * Geoffrey OBrien, author of <i>Sonata for Jukebox</i> * Anyone who knew New York in the 1970s knows it was a different city from that of today. New York Calling is like a Rough Guide to a city receding into a dim past but now brought startlingly, evocatively to life by the amazing group of writers assembled by Marshall Berman and Brian Berger * Francis Morrone, author of <i>The Architectural Guidebook to New York City</i> * with 230 photographs sprinkled throughout, this multivoiced collection establishes itself as a unique document of the citys last three decades. * <i>Publishers Weekly</i> *