The novelist Colson Whitehead re-creates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. In this portrait of the greatest of cities, Colson Whitehead conveys with immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home. His style, a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories, is as multi-layered and multifarious as New York itself. There is a funny, knowing riff on what it feels like to arrive there for the first time; a lyrical meditation on how the city is transformed by an unexpected rain shower; while another captures those magical moments when the city seems to be talking directly to you, inviting you to become one with its rhythms.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Very good but not colossal:
This little sort of tone poem captures some of the beauty and some of the meanness of New York life. I didn't come away from THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK as being negative toward the city, but even if Mr. Whitehead were, we New Yorkers need our cranks and curmudgeons. It makes us part of who we are, after all. The free style works MOST of the time. When it doesn't, it really doesn't. (It is no coincidence that the most straight-forward section, the introduction, is the most superb!) THE COLOSSUS OF NEW... more info
ride the riffs, friend:
Colson Whitehead's "The Colossus of New York" is a sort of prose poem to New York. But interestingly enough, the city's identity is almost incidental. New York could be any megalopolis. Whitehead simply uses it as a convenient dumping ground for heaping piles of metaphor, innuendo, and wry pseudo-Freudian slip-riffs. As Whitehead eventually says: "Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world." He even outdoes Iain Sinclair in this territory because, hey, "Colossus" is actually readable.more info
Surprisingly negative:
The author writes negative comments about every subject, even about subjects he likes. Everything sounds bad in "his New York", as he calls it. I was very disappointed in this book because I really like NY. I read about half the book and threw it in the trash.
Oh, this could have been so good...:
Colson Whitehead is a talented writer, as one can easily see in his first two novels. So when I read that he was writing nonfiction about New York, I was thrilled at the prospects. But I don't know what to make of this book.
The majority of the 13 parts have the same structure. Take a place. Write short sentences that explain what you would see at that place. Include actions and thoughts of those characters.
On paper, it sounds awful, and it some ways it is. It is the shortest 176 pages you... more info
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