Fifty years ago, New York City had only a handful of ethnic groups. Today, the whole world can be found within the city’s five boroughs–-and Berger sets out to discover that world and take his readers on a delightful, eye-opening tour, bringing alive the sights, smells, tastes, and the people from myriad lands living in the most cosmopolitan city.
For urban enthusiasts and armchair explorers alike, The World in a City is a look at today’s polyglot, polychrome, and culturally rich New York and the lessons it holds for the rest of the United States as immigration changes the face of the nation. With three out of five of the city’s residents either foreign-born or second-generation Americans, New York has become more than ever a collection of villages–virtually self-reliant hamlets, each exquisitely textured by its particular ethnicities, history, and politics. For the price of a subway ride, you can visit Ghana, the Philippines, Ecuador, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh and dozens of other countries.
As Berger shows us in this absorbing and enlightening odyssey, New York is an endlessly fascinating crossroads. Naturally, tears exist in this colorful social fabric: the controversy over Korean-language shop signs in tony Douglaston, Queens; the struggles between new and older generations of Indians and Afghanis over arranged marriages; the prevalence of divorce among so many illegal immigrants; the uneasy proximity of traditional cottages and new McMansions built by recently arrived Russian residents of Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn.Yet in spite of the tensions, what Berger has found most miraculous about New York is how the city and its more than eight million denizens can adapt to–and even embrace–change like no other place on earth, from the former pushcart knish vendor on the Lower East Side who now caters to his customers via the Internet, to the recent émigrés from former Soviet republics living in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and Midwood whose arrival saved New York’s fur trade from certain extinction.
What is happening in New York is coming soon to a theater new you across much of the United States. But New York the great entry point for the Italians, Irish, Germans and Jews who have blended, in many cases, seamlessly into the America founded by people from Great Britain and Holland is the best place to examine how our country is being reshaped.
Like the place it chronicles, The World in a City is an engaging hybrid. Blending elements of sociology, pop culture, and travel writing, this is the rare book that enlightens readers while imbuing them with the hope that even in this increasingly fractious and polarized world, we can indeed co-exist in harmony.