PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThankfully, New Yorkers is not War and Peace, with its several hundred characters. Taylor culled and cut a lot. But among those who made it into New Yorkers, some are unforgettable ... The subtitle of New Yorkers is almost as generic as a Duane Reade: \'A City and Its People in Our Time.\' Happily, New Yorkers is livelier than that. Much livelier ... Some of what surges past makes you cringe ... [interviewee Joshua] Jelly-Schapiro’s last few lines nicely capture his city and Taylor’s, a place that too often seems unfathomable to its populace and unmanageable to its leaders.
Alex Beam
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewBeam’s thorough and thoughtful account is both a knowing biography of an object — the house — and of its two principals, the well-documented Mies and the widely overlooked Farnsworth. Fortunately for Beam’s purposes, Farnsworth left an unpublished memoir. But Beam concludes that Farnsworth \'isn’t always a reliable narrator\' ... The Mies biographer Franz Schulze, who died last year, wrote that \'it is simplistic to say that Farnsworth wanted the house and Mies, and Mies wanted the house and the next client.\' Beam makes clear that their relationship was complicated. But sometimes, the simplistic explanation actually makes the most sense.
