lb history of New York City, which they dubbed "Gotham" (the book stops somewhat abruptly in 1898, apparently you have to crack 5 lbs to get to the 20th century). The Gotham Book Prize was created in mid-2020 by Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson to recognize the culture that has made New York City special for generations and to uplift the creative community during the challenges of the pandemic.

But the book concluded superbly with the 1894 referendum in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Bronx, and of course Manhattan that consolidated all the different cities/towns into a “Greater New York,” effective January 1, 1898.There is also much here about the waves of immigrants, from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe, and about the ongoing conflicts between the upper crust and the working class, and between the proper and the licentious. Those previous winning books sit on Fofana's bookshelf, and he said it's "absolutely surreal" to be included among them. And it is not easy to forget the unsung tragedy of the draft riots that occurred during the Civil War, once one has read about it.

Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1994; "The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice," which earned a book award from the Northeast Popular Culture Association in 1998; and "Confronting Homelessness: Poverty, Politics, and the Failure of Social Policy," which secured an Outstanding Book Award from Choice magazine, a publication of the American Library Association, in 2013.When I began this book, I thought that I would speed through it in a summer month of dedicated reading, while there was little else to distract me.

Gotham Books is a self-publishing house that will help guide you through all the processes it takes to make sure your book is the next one those readers pick up. In that first summer of 2011, at the hairpin turn of the pedestrian ramp winding down to the platform, there was always a young violinist in a sundress playing Mendelssohn or Paganini, always playing with a childlike joy and an ethereal smile.Deacon King Kong by James McBride was selected as the first annual Gotham Book Prize winner in April 2021. But then I realized I was rating a book not on it's merits, but on the attitude I adopted from the inefficient approach I had for reading this book.