City of Dreams, Tyler Anbinder
City of Dreams, Tyler Anbinder
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

City of Dreams
The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

Author: Tyler Anbinder

Narrator: George Guidall

Unabridged: 24 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 10/18/2016


Synopsis

A defining American story, never before told with such breadth of scope, lavish research, and resounding spirit With more than three million foreign-born residents today, New York has been America's defining port of entry for nearly four centuries, a magnet for transplants from all over the globe. These migrants have brought their hundreds of languages and distinct cultures to the city, and from there to the entire country. More immigrants have come to New York than all other entry points combined. City of Dreams is peopled with memorable characters both beloved and unfamiliar, whose lives unfold in rich detail: the young man from the Caribbean who passed through New York on his way to becoming a Founding Father; the ten-year-old Angelo Siciliano, from Calabria, who transformed into Charles Atlas, bodybuilder; Dominican-born Oscar de la Renta, whose couture designs have dressed first ladies from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama. Tyler Anbinder's story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs, all playing out against the powerful backdrop of New York City, at once ever-changing and profoundly, permanently itself. City of Dreams provides a vivid sense of what New York looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like over the centuries of its development and maturation into the city we know today.

About Tyler Anbinder

Tyler Anbinder is a professor of history at George Washington University. His first book, Nativism and Slavery, was also a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Arlington, VA.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Laurie on October 09, 2016

History professor Anbinder, himself a native of New York, traces the waves of immigrants that have built NYC into the behemoth it is today. From Peter Minuit and his deal with the Native Americans to today, the author follows wave after wave of immigrants and how they shaped the city. From the Purit......more

Goodreads review by Dan on October 29, 2016

If I may be so bold, this is the best work of history published so far in 2016. Before I get into exactly why, let me first acknowledge that when large-scale tomes like this emerge, reviewers frequently cart out the trite adjectives of, "magisterial, hugely-ambitious, all-encompassing, sweeping," an......more

Goodreads review by SundayAtDusk on September 11, 2016

This is a highly readable book, but I still think most books over 400 pages are too long. Thus, for that reason, along with the fact I've read lots and lots about immigrants in New York, I focused intently on what topics interested me the most and skimmed the rest. Tyler Anbinder is an excellent his......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on June 25, 2023

Received as a gift so I'm already partial but I certainly enjoyed reading this. A brief but very readable survey of New York immigration. A lot of the problems I might otherwise have had with the book were qualified by the author in the introduction (especially the extreme brevity of the treatment o......more

Goodreads review by Shannon on June 21, 2021

I only picked up this book because I was interested in the early history of New York, so this review is for the book through the Irish potato famine, where I stopped reading. Really interesting, enjoyable book. I find it so fascinating how Manhattan was originally settled by Europeans, how they work......more