Books like Gotham Unbound

If the United States had been settled west-to-east, there’s a good chance Manhattan would have been made a national park. That’s how biologically diverse this city is at its core. This book provides the broadest view of New York City history by describing the area before European settlement and the ensuing urbanization. This book uses historical maps, GPS data, and other inputs to reveal the surprisingly rich natural history of New York City, while also providing a thoughtful analysis of how dramatically things have changed, as well as a compelling framework for a more sustainable future for New York. 

This book revealed a pastoral Manhattan few of us could imagine, including feral pigs that roamed the streets, and horses that transported everything and everyone around town. Set in the transformative 1800s when New York City underwent unprecedented urbanization, this book shows how farmers and other New Yorkers who worked the land were ultimately squeezed from Manhattan for more profitable tenants, and how Central Park, and other open spaces, sought to replicate all that recently displaced nature.   

This field guide is a thorough almanac of all the surprising critters that call New York City home. Each page carries with it historical context along with biological information and gorgeous illustrations of each individual species. This comprehensive catalog of New York City’s flora and fauna is a must-have for any urban wildlife devotee. 

Written forty years after the Clean Water Act, this book discusses the arc New York City’s harbor took from biologically productive asset to deeply degraded dumping ground to recently rehabilitated ecosystem. This book is particularly interesting in how it provides a vantage point to what is going on below the surface, where wildlife thrives but is rarely noticed. 

I wanted to see what the park was planned to be in order to compare its original design with what it has become.

Brenwall gave me all of that preliminary background information in great detail, not just with her historical commentary but through the nineteenth-century maps and designs she shares. I took great pleasure in comparing Frederick Olmstead’s winning design with the many other possible layouts the park could have had.

What’s more, the book itself is beautiful. Urban planning has never looked so good.

Well, the title and subtitle say it all. Who wouldn’t be interested? I certainly was.

But it’s not just the 50s-the 70s that we see in this history of the newspaper; we are taken right up into the recent 2000s, and all the changes and permutations and personalities involved. The author herself worked for the Voice, so it is an inside story too.

Also, it is not just a biography of the major American voice in alternative journalism covering art, film, music, and literature. It is an autobiography of many of the writers and artists who tell their own stories during their time at the Voice in oral history fashion.

I knew I was getting the real, if sometimes conflicting, skinny on the personalities and evolutions of the paper. I found the whole thing engaging from start to finish because of this direct personal quality in the way the history/biography… show more.

The COVID pandemic brought on a struggle of isolation and reduced options, made worse in 2020 and ’21 for those of us in northern climes where winters stretch on for nearly half the year. If you’re like me and you wait impatiently for the first true signs of spring, then you may find the simple structure Angela Douglas employs in Nature on the Doorstep to be just the antidote you need.

Starting on March 22, 2020 (a day after the spring equinox, but nature follows its own calendar), Douglas filled her pandemic days by writing family members one letter each week for a full year’s cycle. She chose as the focus of her missives her own modest backyard and the life–and death–portrayed on that stage. It’s the modesty of this work that was its greatest appeal to me. 

In clear, non-esoteric language, Douglas finds beauty and wonder in Vultures and… show more.

I was volunteering with the Appalachian Prison Book Project when Hugh Ryan’s book came out.

Suddenly, The Women’s House of Detention was everywhere—RuPaul’s Drag Race, Fresh Air, mainstream news—yet Hugh was willing to do a virtual book talk with volunteers in West Virginia who provide books to incarcerated people. The book tells the history of a prison 500 feet from the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, and the women and transgender individuals who were incarcerated there because of their gender performance and sexual orientation.

Hugh Ryan lays out how women were arrested for going out at night alone, wearing pants, accepting a date from a man, drunkenness, etc., if they were perceived as the “wrong kind of woman.” The prison stood in Greenwich Village from 1929 to 1974, and the experience of women incarcerated there drives home the point that incarceration and punishment of women is not… show more.

I love this book because it’s the best fictional example I’ve ever seen of a character’s disability being eclipsed by his talent. Lincoln Rhyme is paralyzed, but his talent as a criminologist is far more important—and Deaver showcases Rhyme’s genius and passion as often as he details the difficulties of disability.

I find the book’s mystery compelling and the characters well-written, and I couldn’t get enough of the relationship between Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs. I’ve never seen a better portrayal of a partnership based solidly on mutual respect and admiration. I’m so grateful for how this story demonstrates that disability doesn’t need to stop you from making a real impact through the gifts and talents you’ve been given.

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.