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The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City
Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Nonfiction
From award-winning New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, the story of the world's most exceptional city, told through 31 little-known yet pivotal inhabitants who helped define it.
In Sam Roberts's pulsating history of the world's most exceptional metropolis, greet the city anew through thirty-one unique New Yorkers you've probably never heard of-just in time for the city's 400th birthday.
The New Yorkers introduces the first woman to appear nude in a motion picture, becoming the face of Civic Fame as Miss Manhattan; the couple whose soirée ended the Gilded Age with an embarrassing bang; and the husband and wife who invented the modern celebrity talk show. It reveals the victim of the city's first recorded murder in the seventeenth century and the high school dropout who slashed crime rates in the twentieth. The notorious mobster who was imperiously banished from the city and the woman who successfully sued a bus company for racial discrimination a century before Rosa Parks.
Some deserved monuments, but their grandeur was overlooked or forgotten. Others shepherded the city through its perpetual evolution, but discreetly. Virtually all have vanished into New York's uncombed history. The New Yorkers is a living biography of the world's greatest city, and no one knows New York better than Sam Roberts-or is better at bringing its history to life.
From award-winning New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, the story of the world's most exceptional city, told through 31 little-known yet pivotal inhabitants who helped define it.
In Sam Roberts's pulsating history of the world's most exceptional metropolis, greet the city anew through thirty-one unique New Yorkers you've probably never heard of-just in time for the city's 400th birthday.
The New Yorkers introduces the first woman to appear nude in a motion picture, becoming the face of Civic Fame as Miss Manhattan; the couple whose soirée ended the Gilded Age with an embarrassing bang; and the husband and wife who invented the modern celebrity talk show. It reveals the victim of the city's first recorded murder in the seventeenth century and the high school dropout who slashed crime rates in the twentieth. The notorious mobster who was imperiously banished from the city and the woman who successfully sued a bus company for racial discrimination a century before Rosa Parks.
Some deserved monuments, but their grandeur was overlooked or forgotten. Others shepherded the city through its perpetual evolution, but discreetly. Virtually all have vanished into New York's uncombed history. The New Yorkers is a living biography of the world's greatest city, and no one knows New York better than Sam Roberts-or is better at bringing its history to life.
384 pages, Paperback
Published November 19, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 17, 2025
The good is that each chapter of the book is like its own stand-alone biography, so I often read a chapter and then put the book down for quite a while. The bad is that some chapters were hard to care about and a real slog. Pretty hit or miss.
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October 19, 2024Giveaway !!
July 17, 2025
nearly 500 pages about history altering New Yorkers and Samantha from Sex and the City doesn’t get mentioned once?
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews