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3.44 AVERAGE
3.44 AVERAGE
I do generally love a good muckraking - The Jungle is an old favorite of mine - and New York is another favorite subject. On the topic of New York, Riis' book, unfortunately, compares rather poorly with the dishy and entertaining Lights and Shadows of New York Life, which covers much of the same territory and which I read a few months ago. HtOHL comes to feel repetitive, is excessively moralistic in tone, too reliant on the police for information which seems not terribly credible, and is surprisingly racist in places. The part of the book I learned the most from, sadly, was the picture of Riis' attitudes toward people of other races and extractions as an illumination of the racism of the era, rather than from feeling I'd been enlightented on the book's subject much more than what Lights and Shadows had accomplished in a chapter or two. I struggled with the sentence structure quite a bit throughout - too many dependent clauses strung in webs as dense, dark, and maze-like as the tenements themselves - but that is probably the fault of the cognitive problems caused by my illness rather than the text being especially hard to decipher.
dark
informative
medium-paced
Interesting. Written from a sensation, journalistic standpoint. Not bad. I would recommend this to anyone who does not know about the tenement housing situation and Five Points of New York City.
Read this in college for a history project and it always stuck with me.
dark
informative
reflective
sad
A nonfiction documenting the awful conditions of 19th century tenement housing in New York City. There are some gems in the book still true today like, “To many Americans poverty equals punishment,” and his insistence that housing equality will improve the health of the tenants.
However, the research subjects are given no dignity throughout the book. The author’s racial bias against the actual humans he was studying was so strong that his reporting is unreliable and somewhat predatory.
However, the research subjects are given no dignity throughout the book. The author’s racial bias against the actual humans he was studying was so strong that his reporting is unreliable and somewhat predatory.
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Useful to look at re: NYC tenements but OMG is this a racist viewpoint.. I mean there's nothing nice said about any nationality of immigrant or African Amer. migrant... It's basically a laundry list of negative traits/habits of every class and nationality of tenement dwellers that Riis believes is impacted and amplified by tenement living. One chapter is focused on improved tenements (or getting rid of them altogether if possible).
This book is a phenomenal glimpse into 20th Century America, but it does have some ethnic hatred and racism, unfortunately appropriate for its time. Very vivid book that chronicles the life of the urban poor and gives thrilling context to the reform movement that happened shortly after this book's publishing.