New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time

No book could capture the endless chaos, ambition, and struggles for survival of our biggest city, but you can get a hint of its millions of voices here. Working in the Studs Terkel oral-history tradition, Taylor, a Canadian who gave the same loving treatment to another adopted city in Londoners, has chosen the best from his years of conversations with ordinary New Yorkers, and the best of these—from a skyscraper window washer, a 911 dispatcher, an elevator repairman, and a lawyer almost killed by COVID—express, with everyday profundity, philosophies of living in a great and merciless metropolis. (For the audiobook, available through our partners at Libro.fm and read by a rotating cast of ten narrators, a special shoutout to Luis Moreno, who pulled off the tricky assignment of reading other people's oral histories with a particular New York flair.)