The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries) - Softcover

Wynn, Jonathan R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226919064 ISBN 13: 9780226919065

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2011

Synopsis

Everyone wants to visit New York at least once. The Big Apple is a global tourist destination with a dizzying array of attractions throughout the five boroughs. The only problem is figuring out where to start—and that’s where the city’s tour guides come in.

These guides are a vital part of New York’s raucous sidewalk culture, and, as The Tour Guide reveals, the tours they offer are as fascinatingly diverse—and eccentric—as the city itself. Visitors can take tours that cover Manhattan before the arrival of European settlers, the nineteenth-century Irish gangs of Five Points, the culinary traditions of Queens, the culture of Harlem, or even the surveillance cameras of Chelsea—in short, there are tours to satisfy anyone’s curiosity about the city’s past or present. And the guides are as intriguing as the subjects, we learn, as Jonathan R. Wynn explores the lives of the people behind the tours, introducing us to office workers looking for a diversion from their desk jobs, unemployed actors honing their vocal skills, and struggling retirees searching for a second calling. Matching years of research with his own experiences as a guide, Wynn also lays bare the grueling process of acquiring an official license and offers a how-to guide to designing and leading a tour.

Touching on the long history of tour-giving across the globe as well as the ups and downs of New York’s tour guide industry in the wake of 9/11, The Tour Guide is as informative and insightful as the chatty, charming, and colorful characters at its heart.

About this title

About the Author:

Jonathan R. Wynn teaches in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Review:

"[This book] introduces us to a wide variety of guides to that city and positively celebrates the diversity, the idiosyncrasy, the subversiveness even the fictive nature of the stories they impose on the urban landscape... It's a fine piece of ethnography, very warm, very human, very interesting." -Laurie Taylor, BBC Radio

"Explores the mysterious world of these urban explorers... on a plethora of cultural, historical, maritime, culinary and educational tours conducted mostly for tourists, but also frequented by curious New Yorkers" -Sam Roberts, The New York Times

"With lively analysis punctuated by illustrative field notes from Wynn's own experiences on walking tours [The Tour Guide] has a suitably peripatetic structure, which takes the reader on a tour of its own." -Natalie Alvarez, American Ethnologist

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0226919064
• ISBN 13: 9780226919065
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240