I'm ravenously interested in New York history period, and when I lived in New York, I found the Five Points area (which is now almost entirely Chinatown and civic and municipal buildings) deeply odd--the dark, serpentine streets, the ancient-seeming tenement buildings, the sudden thoroughfares, the random parks. I've been meaning to read Five Points for some time. It's a dense but mostly readable book, with a few quirks. There is a sense of relentlessness about some of it, which I suppose is to be expected in any account of a poverty-stricken area, particularly one that has been poverty-stricken for roughly one hundred and fifty years. But there was a density here that could have been shot through with a little more oxygen. I also found the author's passive-aggressive handling of fellow Five Points chronicler Luc Sante strange. There are two instances where he specifically calls Sante's scholarship out with disdain. And there were also sloppy typos and inconsistencies. For example, in the otherwise extremely well handled section on Jacob Riis, the author indicates that "...on June 5, 1875" Riis wrote a letter to the woman he'd been pining over for more than a decade, who was living overseas, telling her he loved her, wanted her to come to America, etc. Then on the next page, he indicates that Elisabeth responded to his letter a full year earlier than he sent it ("November 1, 1874" has Riis staring dumbly at the reply to that letter, from Elisabeth, which she'd delayed writing for months and months). Little things like that throw me off, perhaps because I'm an editor myself.

But for sheer scope and depth of scholarship, I was truly impressed. I got exactly what I wanted when I looked for a book on Five Points. I hear the voices of the people here, as Anbinder does a great job of weaving those first person accounts into the narrative, and is also good at pointing out the media's complicity through the decades of perpetuating negative stereotypes about the various ethnicities that inhabited Five Points. I would have liked to have seen far more on the African-Americans' day-to-day lives in the Five Points, but I imagine the research material for such an approach is scant to nonexistent.