The New Yorkers

31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City

By: Sam Roberts

Narrated by: Jamie Renell

Bloomsbury presents The New Yorkers by Sam Roberts, read by Jamie Renell.

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.©2022 Sam Roberts (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

There is a reason you have not heard of most of these people…

The reason most of these stories are unknown is because they don’t have anything to say. Maybe if you live in New York and care about the minutiae of its history, you will find this of interest. I did not. And the reader did nothing to hold my attention.

Superb History of New York City

"The New Yorkers" is superb history of New York City through 31 biographies of New Yorkers who are largely unknown today.
Each historic individual played a key role is an aspect of New York City history ranging from "Whodunit? The First Recorded Homicide" (John Colman - early 1600s) to "The Commonsense Cop" (Jack Maple - 1970s to 1990s).

Great New Yorkers from a liberal perspective

I think we need a list of great New Yorkers from a more conservative author. I agree with many of the people he has chosen for his list. However, I do not think that Daniel Patrick Moynihan should have been overlooked. The crime crisis should have discussed Moynihan’s explanation for this problem. And the broken windows policy successes. The author appears to blame it all on a new drug arriving on the scene.

Amazing research and elucidation.

Be smarter than those around you. Read this book. You will be remembered at parties.