Reviews for New York Stories: The Best Writing from Four Decades of New York Magazine

The average rating for New York Stories: The Best Writing from Four Decades of New York Magazine based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-05-02 00:00:00 Carl Butler Really a remarkable collection. It has Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic" and "The 'Me' Decade" pieces; the articles that gave rise to movies such as Grey Gardens, Saturday Night Fever, and Goodfellas; and what I think is Gloria Steinem's coining of the phrase Women's Lib (in her article "After Black Power, Women's Liberation"; she went on to launch Ms. magazine as an insert to New York magazine). I really had no idea that New York was such an important magazine. The collection also contains two or three other articles that I had to pass along to friends...Emily Nussbaum's "Say Everything," about the new generation gap between "digital natives" and the rest of us, and Adam Sternbergh's "Up with Grups," which points out the weird LACK of a generation gap between cargo-panted, T-shirt-wearing, Alt Music-loving 50-year-olds like me and our identical (in those ways, anyway) junior counterparts. The book is a pretty amazing time-travel ride as it bounces around throughout the magazine's 40-year history. Can't recommend it too highly.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-23 00:00:00 Mikee Pablo The anointed star of this anthology of magazine articles is Tom Wolfe. Which is a shame: His foreword is a self-referential affair full of Wolfe's flabby "new journalism" tics and affectations, and his two pieces ' on dining with the Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein's Upper East Side apartment and on the "me" generation of the '70s ' aren't much better. But don't let that deter you. This is a superb collection. Pete Hamill's essay on the angry white working class is eerily prescient and could have appeared today, while Jimmy Breslin's profile of young, swinging Joe Namath in late '60s New York feels, oddly, undated. There's Joyce Wadler's moving essay on her breast cancer diagnosis; Ariel Levy's funny and biting "Female Chauvinist Pigs," and Debbie Nathan's astonishing piece on the lives of illegal immigrant migrants living cheek by jowl in a Washington Heights tenement. There are also the articles, like Nik Cohn's "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" and Nicholas Pileggi's "Wiseguy," which found wider cultural resonance as the films "Saturday Night Fever" and "Goodfellas," respectively. Not everything here is a winner. A Stephen Sondheim piece on crossword puzzles is tedious, and I couldn't get through a Nora Ephron essay on Manhattan's proto-foodies. But this is the rare anthology that a reader can indulge in without picking and choosing. It also shows that the issues of New York and the issues of the United States as a whole are more closely related than commonly thought. It just takes a good writer to make the connection. But maybe not Tom Wolfe.