cover image A History of New York

A History of New York

Francois Weil, Frangois Weil, Franois Weil. Columbia University Press, $24.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-231-12935-0

Trying to write a concise history of New York is probably as impossible as trying to encompass the city in a week-long package tour. The most successful history to date, Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace's richly nuanced Gotham (1998), takes the reader only through 1890. Give French historian Weil credit for trying to compress more than 400 years into a mere 256 pages, but the results are predictable. The narrative perforce must be compacted to the point where much of the city's personality is lost. Weil's attempt to impose an interpretive framework (""the history of the tension between capitalism and diversity"") also fails on two counts: first, in the murkiness of the premise; and second, as an argument that can hardly be explored adequately in such a short book. The volume's more serious problem is that issues of cause and effect are obscured or omitted, leaving the reader with little more than the kind of impressionistic view a day-tripper might get from a sightseeing bus.