Lucky Corner

Mike Wallace’s Gotham at War is the third volume of the most ambitious—and probably the lengthiest—work ever produced about the history of a single American metropolis. The first volume, published in 1999 and co-authored with Edwin Burrows, began with the fateful meeting between Lenape natives and Dutch colonists on the island of Manhattan early in the 17th century and concluded with the merger of the five boroughs into a single “supercity” in 1898. The second took us from 1898 to the start of World War I, examining the cross currents of radicalism and conservatism that made New York into a modern metropolis. Now, in Gotham at War, Wallace tackles Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s New York and how a popular front of radicals and reformers transformed the city into a fount of social democracy. Reviewing the book for The Nation, Michael Kazin writes that “this grand trilogy represents an unstated tribute to the new social history, or ‘people’s history,’ that became popular beginning in the 1960s.” That achievement is encapsulated in the cacophony of voices emerging from the book, and the completist nature of Wallace’s approach: “No one has ever known the history of New York City better than Mike Wallace or told it so well. Barring a total surrender to AI, I bet no one ever will.” Read “Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York”

Misunderstood

Everybody seems to know what The Bluest Eye, one of the great American novels, is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. But that’s not really a spoiler. In fact, Toni Morrison gave away the whole plot of her first novel in its opening section. Yet, even though Morrison is clear about the story she is going to tell in The Bluest Eye, the novel is still frequently misunderstood. Part of the reason, as Namwali Serpell explains in an excerpt from her upcoming book, On Morrison, is that The Bluest Eye announces Morrison’s explicit political project as a novelist: “The novel in essence enacts structural racism while refusing to villainize individual culprits.” This ambition is embodied in the work’s aesthetic, its narrative construction, and the unique way of rendering dialogue and description, hinging on absence and gaps as much as on disclosure. As Serpell concludes: “In Morrison’s opening literary foray, then, she uses formal techniques of negation to trouble the spiritual, intellectual, and artistic ideals many of us take for granted.” Read “Nobody Knows “The Bluest Eye””