Manhattan '45 - Hardcover

Morris, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195038703 ISBN 13: 9780195038705

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1987

Synopsis

On June 25, 1945, 14,000 American service men and women sailed into New York aboard the British liner Queen Mary. They were the first big contingent to return from the victory over Nazi Germany, and the city that awaited them stood at a historical climax of power, confidence, hope, and prestige, still curiously laced with a provincial innocence.
In this new book by one of the most gifted stylists in the English language, we disembark at Manhattan with the returning GIs, and discover for ourselves how the city was. We ride the vanished trollies, the El, the Hudson River ferry-boats. We meet characters as disparate as developer Robert Moses, Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club, painter Jackson Pollock, and Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village denizen who claimed to speak the seagull language. We explore Harlem and the Lower East Side, we inspect the menu at the legendary Le Pavillon, we board the Twentieth Century Limited, and we swoon to Sinatra at Radio City Music Hall.
Few aspects of Manhattan are neglected in Jan Morris's affectionate evocation--slum and Social Register are both here, City College and Times Square, the genius of the New York School and the panache of the New York Fire Department. Manhattan '45 gets its title, so the author tells us in her epilogue, because it sounds "partly like a kind of gun, and partly like champagne," and in these pages the victorious, celebratory, and explosive Manhattan of four decades ago finds a permanent souvenir.

About this title

About the Author

About the Author:
Jan Morris's most recent books are The Matter of Wales, Last Letters from Hav, and Among the Cities.

Reviews

Noted travel writer Morris takes us on a trip to the Manhattan of 1945. The Queen Mary docked in New York City on June 20, 1945, with the first major contingent of troops returning from the European battlefield. Morris has us join those returning troops in touring a city poised on the brink of a brilliant future. We celebrate Manhattan in all its glory and ignominyits politics, its business, its entertainment, its culture, its various races, classes, and ethnic groups. Vivid descriptions and diverting anecdotes of life make for a fascinating and enjoyable tour. Morris conveys the excitement of being in New York City as it awakens to a new age in a book that will absorb all lovers of Manhattan. Pat Ensor, Indiana State Univ. Lib., Terre Haute
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195038703
• ISBN 13: 9780195038705
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 273