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A review by jonfaith
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Lucy Sante
3.0
Night is forgotten and endlessly repeated; it is glorious and it sits next door to death.
After a scintillating introduction Low Life slipped into the mundane, a survey of 19C journalism rather than an exploration itself of Manhattan's less becoming aspects--which ultimately was a list of ethnically robust names. Such a list was then attached to some sociological blight. Indeed this was two-star experience until the splendid section on bohemian life. That should have been the focus of this work, not an insouciant inventory of vice and corruption.
This work is supposed to be a compendium of ghosts, the spectral legacy of a metropolis built overnight, being a Golden Door which charged double to those weary masses. My reading alternated between boredom and anger, given the poetic possibilities of the subject, a subject one Lewis Allan Reed called a circus and a sewer. Sante missed that chance.
After a scintillating introduction Low Life slipped into the mundane, a survey of 19C journalism rather than an exploration itself of Manhattan's less becoming aspects--which ultimately was a list of ethnically robust names. Such a list was then attached to some sociological blight. Indeed this was two-star experience until the splendid section on bohemian life. That should have been the focus of this work, not an insouciant inventory of vice and corruption.
This work is supposed to be a compendium of ghosts, the spectral legacy of a metropolis built overnight, being a Golden Door which charged double to those weary masses. My reading alternated between boredom and anger, given the poetic possibilities of the subject, a subject one Lewis Allan Reed called a circus and a sewer. Sante missed that chance.