| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-08-01 | | Edition Description: | Illustrated |
| Size | | Length: | 252 pages | | Height: | 10.5 in | | Width: | 7.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 28.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
None of the world's great cities is as closely identified with its subway as New York. Its trains provide much more than just rapid transit. They give New Yorkers a powerful symbol of their metropolis, one that they use to express both their hopes and their fears for the urban future. Subway City explores New York's transit system as both fact and metaphor. Brooks traces the development of the subway from its inception as the newest and most efficient public transportation system to its decline as an overcrowded and dangerous part of city life. The crowded cars gave Harold Lloyd material for comedy, fueled William Randolph Hearst's crusade against the Traction Trust, and convinced Lewis Mumford that the subway was a futile effort to solve the city's problems. Brooks explores films which have dramatized the dangers lurking below ground, and examines the infamous Bernhard Goetz shooting that made the subway a symbol of urban decay. More hopefully, he describes the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's station improvements and ambitious programs for Music Underground, Poetry in Transit, and Arts-in-Transit, as keys to the city's renewal. Brooks probes the image of the subway in the work of such artistic and literary figures as Reginald Marsh, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, Walker Evans, Tom Wolfe, Saul Bellow, Red Grooms, and Keith Haring. He uses the work of Isabel Bishop, Betty Smith, Minna Citron, and Donna Dennis to show how women have experienced the subway. And he shows how Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones have used the subway to explore the city's racial tensions. -- Copiously illustrated text surveys all aspects -- political,technological, and representational -- of the subject. -- Examines the subway in journalism, poetry, painting, and novels. -- Race, gender, and class issues are thoroughly covered.
Industry Reviews
Throughout this century, the New York City subway has represented both the successes and failure of the modern city. Brooks (John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture, LJ 4/15/87) has written an eminently readable history of the New York City subway system and its impact on residents, politicians, and, in particular, artists and authors, from the earliest subway proposals and elevated railways in the 1860s through the depression and crime of the 1970s and 1980s. The comic films of Harold Lloyd, the political machinations of William Randolph Hearst, the paintings of Reginald Marsh, and the writings of James Baldwin have all reflected the influence of the subway. Brooks illustrates his work with many reproductions of newspaper cartoons, etchings, and woodcuts, and it contains extensive notes. This book will find an audience, both general and scholarly, among readers of history and popular culture. Linda M. Kaufmann, Freel Lib., North Adams State Coll., Mass.
Stefanatos
Subway critics have existed in New York since trains first rumbled underground, and their criticisms have not changed much. Though its creators conceived of a rapid transit system that would lift the lives and spirits of the city's poor, the subway quickly came to represent the "unity lost amid competing urban visions, angry class conflict and mutual recrimination." Brooks, professor of English at West Chester University, offers a study of the subway as an urban symbol. It is both a story of the power of politics and finance in creating the subway and a survey of human impressions. The first half of the book focuses in minute, sometimes tedious, detail on the history of rapid transit and the various influences instrumental in its development, with a particular indictment of William Randolph Hearst. The more successful latter part of the book turns to an analysis of the art and literature it inspired. Critical readings of Ralph Ellison and Betty Smith reveal manifestations of racial and gender inequality, while art ranging from John Sloan to Keith Haring exposes a struggle to understand transformations in both the physical city and its inhabitants. Showing through art and literature how attitudes toward the subway rise and fall over time, Brooks maintains an enthusiastic belief that the subway is a place "to celebrate the urban experience." Despite an extensive and effective use of political cartoons, paintings and illustrations, the book does not include maps to enhance its lengthy discussion of subway expansion. (Aug.)
Lopate
| See an error? Submit a change request |
All rights reserved.
