Excerpt from longer article:
Timely Take-aways for Life-Long Learning: History of Place
Whether exploring the history of remote mountain regions or telling the story of a city through its people, these new works of nonfiction explore how five places around the world evolved over time.
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The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the the Untold Biography of the World’s Greatest City
Sam Roberts, Oct 2022, Bloomsbury Publishing, an imprint of Macmillan
Themes: History, Biography, New York, United States
The story of New York is told through the lives of lesser-known individuals who impacted the cultural landscape of the famous city.
Take-aways: Think about how this book uses individual lives to tell the city’s story. Ask youth to use a biography-focused approach to telling the story of another city. ( )

The New Yorkers by Sam Roberts combines biography and history into a compelling story of a city and, by extension, the country.

There have been a couple of books that have used this method of tracing the history of a city. Roberts mentions Parisians, and there have been a couple of others. Each puts a slightly different twist on the idea of a history or, as this one calls it, a biography of a city. Makes sense since each city is different. This volume works very well.

I enjoy biographies but usually want more about lesser-known people. While there have been more like that in recent years, they also lend themselves to being almost niche reads, in that I might want to read about lesser-known activists but not lesser-known sports figures, while someone else might be the opposite. This book brings together a variety of people and, because there is a thread tying them together, even they all were of interest to me. Not equally, but there were none I skipped or skimmed because each covered a period and a moment in the bigger picture and I wanted the complete picture, not a partial.

Each chapter is a mix of contextualizing history as well as the story of, usually, a particular incident in the person's life and how that event fit in both their life and the city's history. So everything is woven into a tight fabric that entertains and informs.

In recommending this there are the usual suspects, readers of biographies and readers of history, particularly those interested in NYC. I would also include a specific type of reader, one who likes to have a book handy for when they have limited time and don't want to dive back into a novel or a long single argument nonfiction book. This book can easily be enjoyed as a collection of biographic episodes as well as a single 'biography' of New York. So if you keep collections of short stories or essays handy, this would make an excellent candidate as well.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )