Douglas Tallack offers an informed critique of the ultimate American city in this thought-provoking and enjoyable reading of urban culture.  Using a vast array of examples from literature, art, photography and architecture, Tallack writes an original account of the city as text, simultaneously considering the important and changing role of the flâneur within the changing panorama of the ‘New America’.  Bringing this account up to date, there is an investigation into how visual perceptions of the city have been changed by the events of 9/11.  Drawing on a highly detailed structural knowledge of his topic, Tallack discusses differing views of the city, from the growth of capitalism as witnessed in Herman Melville’s Bartleby: A Story of Wall Street, to visions of the Gilded Age in classic novels such as Henry James’s The American Scene and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, to Paul Auster’s post-modern dissemination of the urban in City of Glass. 

Addressing a range of visual explorations of the city, this richly illustrated text traces the development of the civic scene and its acknowledgement of emerging modernities.  Taking into account historical developments, such as the fact that after the population increased, New York City become the largest city in the world in 1925 (12), Tallack investigates the city’s growing preoccupation with verticality, and offers an intriguing examination of different photographic versions of a famous New York landmark; the Flatiron Building.  Analysing work by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz, Tallack explores how differing photographic techniques reveal how ideas of Old New York were gradually influenced by the onset of the New New York. Offering a critique of work by artists such as George Bellows, John Sloan and Georgia O’Keefe, helps present an engaging and wide-reaching study. The development of the transport network in the city, the changing configurations of the New York skyline, the development of the now famous New York grid, and the homes of the leisure class elite are all assessed and evaluated as part of this valuable art history.

Well-written, persuasively argued and wide-ranging in topics, New York Sights would be a valuable asset to any American Studies course, and of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as academics working in the fields of literature, art or urban studies.

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19/03/2006 16:28.   406 words