PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Bowery is a street that has lost its character and been reincarnated — again and again ... While today it sprouts luminous towers with multimillion-dollar condos, it would not take an archaeologist to find traces of its time as the definitive boulevard of broken dreams, lined with flophouses and evangelizing missions that catered to boozed-up \'Bowery bums.\' There are also remnants of the 19th century, when the street was the city’s raffish entertainment hub that, for better or worse, produced early blackface minstrel shows, vaudeville variety acts and the sometimes schmaltzy offerings of the first Yiddish theaters ... While until the last decade or two the Bowery was a street you surely didn’t want to end up on, there were periods when it represented the height of gentility and the peak of showbiz stardom, and in Devil’s Mile Alice Sparberg Alexiou guides us through this checkered history with gusto.
Mike Wallace
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review[Wallace] tells the story of those two decades with encyclopedic sweep and granular detail, but with enough verve and wry humor to make this doorstopper immensely readable. Even weathered aficionados of city lore will find moments of revelation. Newcomers will be fascinated by how it all came to be. What makes the book so entertaining is that it is not a conventional chronicle of how government leaders handled that era’s crises. Rather the book is as much a social and cultural history as it is a political narrative ... My one major quibble is TMI: too much information. The book’s volume of detailed material at moments makes it like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick, possibly trying some readers’ patience. Do we need a hundred crowded pages on the stories of a dozen strikes? A little bit of Wallace’s own consolidation would have made for a less draining reading experience ... New York has always been a work in progress. But the particular years recounted in this essential, absorbing and mostly sprightly history went a long way in shaping the pulsating city we know.
