Much like Londoners, this is a great nugget of all kinds of stories based around New York. I love the personalities and outlook from different people, each story providing you with a personal story. So many interesting new facts and places I want to explore and discover!

Oh how I didn’t want this book to end . . I literally felt as if I was walking the streets of New York while I was reading it .
I loved the diversity of the entries, old and young, rich and poor , native and immigrant , seeing the city through all these different viewpoints makes it such a profound reading experience . It’s perfect to dip in and out of when you’re craving a slice of New York life . It’s for anyone who loves New York or dreams of going to New York , highly recommended

I spent some time living in New York a few years ago and this book really transported me. I admire all the research and effort it took. There were bits that were beautifully written.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review - New Yorkers by Craig Taylor

This review has been made possible thanks to NetGalley and John Murray Press for providing me with an Advance Reader's Copy in exchange for an honest review.

New Yorkers is an insightful look into the people who live and work in the city, have seen it through a number of changes and developments and have made their communities what they are today. It looks at all the different aspects of life in New York, the hustle of it all, the burnout, what the streets are really like, how life differs for the super-rich and the poorer communities

This is a fantastic book with a diverse range of experiences, backgrounds and stories and it seems like the perfect amalgamation of New Yorkers, through and through, aspiring stars coming to New York to make their debut, everyone from Wall Street to cops and cleaners, all who contribute something to the society and make New York what it is. This book is perfect for anyone who loves New York, or even the idea of it, anyone who's lived there or planning on moving there, or your friend who did psychology who is fascinated by the human condition. Truly fantastic read, I cannot recommend it enough.

I love oral histories and was brought up on the immortal Studs Terkel who was the acknowledged master of this genre.

I loved "Londoners", Craig Taylor's previous collection of London lives and this is just as good. The best thing that I can say is that I lived in Manhattan for several years and this book brought back so many fond - and not so fond - memories of the time I spent there and the incredible varied and eclectic nature of this wonderful city.

He talks to people from all walks of life, rich and poor and without exception they paint an incredible evocative picture of New York where anything is possible.

I was entertained and challenged throughout the book and I loved every page of it.

An utterly fascinating book as the individual voices of many New Yorkers paint a picture of their city. This took a lot of research and the individual stories are repeated verbatim which makes it an authentic portrait of the city

This is a collection of interviews with a wide range of New Yorkers going about their business, their lives, jobs, how they came to be in New York and their love for the city itself.
Absolutely fascinating collection of accounts from a wide range of workers in New York, some are tantalisingly short, some long on detail and insightful but all have something interesting to say about modern urban life and the peculiarities of the city and the way it's going - the city where luxury apartments remain empty and no everyday person can afford to buy - as the obscene price of real estate means that there is no where left to buy up or develop in the city, and most of it is owned by remote, insanely wealthy foreigners who may have never set foot in the city itself. The disparities in people's lives and their incomes are astounding, reading about the window cleaner perilously high on a skyscraper or the worker cleaning and carrying out maintenance on some of the endless and ancient elevator systems of the city's buildings. Visitors and tourists wander around in search of the 'real' New York, in search of a long closed CBGBs or a vision of Times Square that no longer exists and older residents lament this or that cool bar, restaurant, neighbourhood or record store that is no more. Really fascinating account of a unique place and it's people.

New Yorkers is an eclectic range of honest interviews, collected by Craig Taylor, who spent years living and talking to people in New York. It’s a perfect coffee table book, which you can pick up and flick through, and read just one interview at a time - whichever you fancy - or you can read through the whole thing, and there’s a momentum and richness in the stories that keeps you going.

I love how each interview is kept in first person, and the voice of each person really shines through. Inclusion is great - people from all walks of life are included, no matter what race, religion, job. It examines power and wealth, real estate and regentrification, includes 9/11, hurricanes, BLM marches and how the city dealt during coronavirus restrictions. The way that Taylor structures the book says something about New York, too - for example, someone complaining about the police and the policing system is put immediately next to an interview with a police officer (or a cop, which they prefer to be called). The contrast is startling when you read it - there are bankers intently discussing pensions and shortly after, a man who sleeps rough on the streets. And such a wide range of jobs, and some that must only be quite so common in a city like New York - window cleaners, elevator engineers. It’s a snapshot of the people who keep New York running, the way they interact with the city, and the way they’re watching it change, or having a part in changing it.

I adore New York, and there was something really special to me reading the stories of people who adore the city in equal measure, and being able to go like, ‘oh, you get it too. we all get it.’

“One of the thing about New York’s anonymity, and cruelty, and in a way, beauty, is that it won’t ever stop for you. … That’s one of the great things about it. When things matter a lot to you, sometimes it’s nice to be in a world that doesn’t care. It’s relieving.”

“Some days there ends up being this proprietary moment when you feel like New York, it’s all for you.”

“New York is less of a melting pot and more of a mosaic. It’s really like different colored tiles, and different people bring who they are.”

I think this book does so well at capturing something of New York, by showing what it means to the people that live there. I’d love to own the physical copy of this book and I would also like Craig Taylor’s other book, Londoners, for when I move to London! Aside from the New York aspect of this book, when I read it, I felt there was something to show for what Craig Taylor had done with his time in New York - just meeting people, spending time with them and listening to their stories, and what he’d gotten out of it. He says:

‘I was awed by what was endlessly offered up. I loved the concrete; I loved the proximity to strangers, how every day you were inches from weirdness, greatness, and everything in between. It was the greatest ongoing flicker of human life I’d ever encountered.’
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#NewYorkers
Free digital copy from #NetGalley

Following on from his previous title Londoners, Craig Taylor searches for the perfect snapshot of a very different, yet still iconic city - New York, His anthological look at America's most famous metropolis features unvarnished versions of the city's past few tumultuous decades from the people who know it best.

His contributions throughout give clarity and perspective only when it is necessary; his own experiences of NYC are woven through interludes in an otherwise untouched treasury of anecdotes, showing just how powerful any one ordinary person's story can be.

New York as seen through the eyes of many different people, snapshots of their lives told to us from the author's interviews and experience with them. They are all united both by the city and through different themes within the book. It's an interesting read to pop in and out of, but I was sort of expecting some photos as I was expecting a coffee-table type book. I think tackling New York when Humans of New York exists and is popular in the online is an ambitious thing to do, and anyone familiar with HONY will have to make the comparison between the two. This definitely reminded me of the long-form posts HONY has done - just without the photos. Still a wonderful book, but just fell short for me.

Having spent a large part of a previous job flying to Manhattan to host events in the finance industry, the version of New York that I used to see was that of Upper Manhattan. Gossip Girl, Skyscrapers and lots of rich powerful men that liked to undermine 22year old, female, overly polite and British: me.
I adored my visits to New York, I’d make sure my flights meant I got a weekend to myself to visit Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. New Yorkers offers an insight in to real New York: the sights, the sounds, the tastes, the politics, the tragedy and the amazing through the perspectives of many many New York inhabitants.
A metropolis of perspectives fitting for the megalopolis that is New York.

Anyone who’s been to New York knows that this is a city like no other. It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes this place so unique: it’s in the vibe, the people, the speed, the buildings, the boroughs, the energy, the possibilities... In his book, New Yorkers, Craig Taylor managed to capture the city’s essence through a series of fascinating interviews with the people who make the city what it is and who invite us to see the city from their point of view.

This is a collection of snapshots of what it's like to live and work in New York, and in some cases what it means to be a New Yorker. There is one relationship that the author comes back to over and over again, but apart from this, there is a huge variety of voices and experiences here. It reminded me very much of Humans of New York, which is a project I follow through Facebook. It's a real social snapshot, kind of like a longer term, more in depth and interesting census. I found myself wanting to know more about some of the people and the people I didn't warm to were only there for a few pages, so it was perfect. The sections which feature people's experiences of 9/11 were particularly fascinating. This is a book you could read in one go, or like me, dip into and out of as they day progresses. During this last few months of COVID I've found it really difficult to concentrate on reading for long periods of time, and this book has been perfect for me.

Having spent a lot of time in New York I loved this book.Craig Taylor spent years in New York getting to know the people of the city the special characters who live and work there .The author grabbed the true flavor of day to day New York.I loved his book The Londoner’s and feel the same about New Yorkers will be recommending.#netgalley #thelondoners

New York. An extraordinary city as seen through the eyes of the ordinary people who live and work there. In their own words, and interviewed over several years, this fascinating narrative paints a rich portrait of a modern city