Books like A Place Called Home — picked by fans

Growing up in New York City, I’ll never forget my first experience, at around the age of seven, with people literally living underground. Our subway stalled in a tunnel in front of an abandoned station. The lights went off in the car and the platform outside was cast in an eerie orange glow by a single bulb.

Suddenly, a figure emerged from the shadows, charged my subway car, and started banging wildly and laughing maniacally, just on the other side of the glass to me. This continued for what felt like a million years before the train came back to life, and we moved on.

Decades later, I discovered this book about a parallel city below mine where people like that man live an alternative existence in miles and miles of dark warrens underground. I’m obsessed with it.

I read The Women’s House of Detention earlier this year and was introduced in its pages to a world of pre-Stonewall policing of queerness and transness. In our current moment, when state laws increasingly seek to restrict the lives of gender-expansive people, this book offers a window into both the origin of these laws and also, importantly, into the lives of queer and trans people who, in their resistance, created space for me to exist, and to name my own existence, today.

Zabar's, New York's world-famous food emporium, is the achievement of another Jewish immigrant family.

Author Lori Zabar's grandparents, before they were a couple, fled pogroms in Russia (now Ukraine) and made their way to New York. Together they worked at a variety of small food stores before starting their own in 1934. From then on, Zabar's helped define the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The story here is one of hard work and eventual success in a family-run business, expanded to include dedicated non-family employees. The book also contains recipes, including two of my personal favorites - latkes and kugel. 

I am definitely recommending some very big books here! 

This one is easily recognizable because of the size of its spine, but it’s also incredibly interesting – an economic, social, and political history of New York City from its founding to consolidation, I think the best thing about this book is all the subjects it covers which I knew nothing about. 

New York City during the American Revolution comes to mind. So does the early history of New York’s apartment buildings. There’s a reason this book won a Pulitzer Prize. 

I like the sequel too (called Greater Gotham, only by Wallace), but prefer this book, I think, because I know the post-1898 history better while much of this book was novel to me.

I’ve read this book more than any book I’ve ever read. It’s what inspired me to not just want to be a writer but a sportswriter.

Telander does what all writers aspire to do: Turn a slice-of-life story—in this case, a group of Black kids from Brooklyn who love playground basketball—into a bigger lesson about human connection. He uses curiosity, an eye for details, and a sense of humor to make every character feel fully realized. 

It takes courage to name your book that. Especially in the 90s before self-publishing became a thing. Which did not stop its renegade author from selling xeroxed copies of it in the streets.

Its titular protagonist, who is jobless and homeless after his girlfriend kicks him out, is based on the author himself. He struggles with feelings of inadequacy and a sense of purposelessness. He works odd jobs, writes an occasional poem, meets eccentric strangers, engages in substance abuse, and gets into sticky situations on account of his bad decisions.

While I don’t know about you, I can strongly relate to the character. The book's dark humor is also enough to make it one of my favorites.

If you read one biography/memoir of a Gilded Age criminal, make it this one. It tells the story (often in his own words) of the celebrated pickpocket George Appo, an odd little half-Chinese, half-Irish, one-eyed fellow who could make $800 in a few days when most working men made less than that in a year. Appo would rivet New Yorkers when he testified about his second career as a “green goods” con man, working to swindle gullible out-of-towners who came to buy purported counterfeit money at a discount, only to discover that there was nothing but sawdust inside the packages they carried away. Appo refused to name names, though, as he was a self-described “good fellow.”  

I’ve lived in New York City all of my life. I sang doo-wop in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village when I was a teenager, and then folk rock with my group, The New Outlook.

If ever there was a time-travel ticket to a past and a place that I knew so well I could still see the sun glinting through the tree leaves, hear the din of the eateries as I walked by, and, most important, still hear the music by people vastly more famous than me, music that actually defied any given time or place, it would be David Browne's book, Talkin' Greenwich Village.  

In 1951, Sydney Taylor invented the memorable Brenners—papa, mama, five sisters, and baby brother—a Jewish family on the Lower East Side in turn-of-the-century New York. Taylor’s words and Helen John’s illustrations in this book, the first in a series, set the scene. A calendar in the parlor announced that it was 1912. Tenements lined city streets. When I read these novels as a child, I did not yet know that they were closely based on Taylor’s own life. When the entire series was republished in 2014, I quipped: I became a Jewish historian because of these books. 

Understanding New York Jews is key to understanding American Jews. There is no city like New York City and there are no Jews like New York Jews. In the middle of the 20th century, they made up around 30% of the total city population. This three-volume award-winning set uncovers aspects of the city’s history that even aficionados don’t know. Each volume can be purchased separately but together they paint an absorbing panorama across four centuries. I like to teach the volumes. They are fresh each time I read them, with lively prose and compelling vignettes. Reading them is like walking the streets of Gotham with a great guide.