A review by jocelynw
How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis

3.0

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.