Reading New York: The Illustrated City, to Tie With a Bow
The New York Times
by Sam Roberts

www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/nyregion/thecity/09read.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

NEW YORK BOUND, that quirky city-themed bookstore in Rockefeller Center, has been closed for a decade. So we culled the shops at the Tenement Museum, New-York Historical Society, Museum of the City of New York and various shelves and catalogs for a few of the most recent, richly illustrated holiday gift books about New York. Here are seven we liked...

...In “The Neighborhoods of Queens” (Yale University Press, $35), Claudia Gryvatz Copquin, a journalist who moved to the borough from South America as a child, melds maps, photos, statistics and a narrative to dissect communities that were home to Jack Kerouac and Howard Stern, among others, and to explore what makes each of Queens’s 100-odd neighborhoods distinct.

As Professor Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia points out in his introduction, “Queens is the most heterogeneous place in the world,” a place where residents typically identify with their neighborhood, rather than the borough or the city as a whole. This microcosmic focus on Queens communities helps define the city’s biggest borough...

Copyright 2007 The New York Times