Maximum City by Michael Pye

Maximum City by Michael Pye

Maximum City is the biography of New York City. It has an exact purpose: to use the past to understand how New York came to be New York, and what we must do about it. It is the story of how the myth of New York was built, and how it shapes the way we see the city still. It tells the history that lies behind each of the headline assumptions about the city - corruption, excess, danger and glory, in a city supposed to be somehow unAmerican. It sometimes celebrates the myth and sometimes contradicts it, but always asking why - why New York is the city of the high society circus, why travellers have always been warned about the danger on its streets, why the city needs graft and why sexuality was always so important to the politics of the libertine city. Through the voices of the past and present, Maximum City celebrates the extreme cae of cities - trying also to understand what kind of phenomenon it is.

Michael Pye works as a author, journalist, historian, and broadcaster for a living. By birth, he is English, but a study in Italy and a newspaper apprenticeship in Scotland have civilized him. He worked as a political and cultural journalist for British publications for 20 years, commuting between New York and Europe. He now lives in a little community in the Portuguese countryside with his partner John Holm. He has eight books to his credit, including The Cinema Brats, co-authored with Lynda Myles, which was the first major study of what the Scorsese generation did to Hollywood; King Over The Sea, which uncovered the Duke of Windsor's manipulations in the wartime Bahamas; Maximum City, a New York biography that set out to find the foundations and history of the city's charm; and The Drownin', which was the first comprehensive study of what the Scorsese generation did

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780330320399
ISBN 10	0330320394
Title	Maximum City
Author	Michael Pye
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Pan Macmillan
Year published	1994-01-14
Number of pages	448
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.