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book is nothing like the movie and therefor is a large disappointment. This is no fault of Amazom or the seller of the book
Poverty was grinding and devastating; you almost can't blame the residents for turning to crime just to survive. Gangs picks up with the gangs around 1840 in the Bowery, the Five Points area. I first watched the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. The death toll equalled that of some of the worst battles of the Civil War.
I didn't really enjoy the movie, but after reading the book, I can definitely see its influence. I became interested in reading The Gangs of New York after reading about the Triangle Factory fire and the influence of Tammany Hall in both. The book really takes off in its description of The Draft Riots of 1863. I do wish that in this new edition some updated information could have been added along with more pictures. Asbury's details about the gangs of this period are fascinating, and the characters are incredibly colorful.
The riots swept the city destroying buildings and nearly entire neighborhoods. It's hard for me to imagine someone named Ida the Goose as inspiring a gang war that left several men dead. The movie takes a few characters from the nonfiction book and shuffles them in with fictional characters and then dramatizes the whole bit. The compelling tales end around the turn of the century and become just recitations of murder and revenge without placing them in the context of the times. But along with Asbury's tale of crime, he also creates a heartbreaking story of the fight for survival in New York during this time.
Americans born here resented immigrants and the immigrants turned on each other. The book was originally released in 1928 so there are several outdated racist terms, and Asbury uses quite of a bit of bigotry when referring to the Chinese. Pictures are definitely required.
You don't even have to know too much about the city's history in order to enjoy the book. 286)).
We're introduced to a number of famous characters, from the mythological Mose with his superhuman strength, to Bill the Butcher, to the Whyo gang, to the tong wars of Chinatown, and to the Monk Eastman gang and Big Jack Zelig. The Gangs of New York is an introduction to the gangs which proliferated in New York, primarily in the notorious Five Points district on the Lower East Side, in the nineteenth century.
Also, the language itself is a little old-fashioned, and Asbury is blatantly racist at times (take this sentence, for example: "[The Bloody Angle in Doyers Street, in Chinatown] was, and is, an ideal place for ambush; the turn is very abrupt, and not even a slant-eyed Chinaman can see around a corner." (p. Although the book is introduced as a work of sociology, it's more a book of popular and cultural history.
Many of the tales Asbury tells on this book are based on rumor and myth and often it's not quite clear what's factual. The Gangs of New York is also dated in that the author will say something like, "such-and-such is located at such-and-such address, where now there's a such-and-such." The New York City that Asbury wrote about was obviously much different from what it is now.But this volume is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the gangs of New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I've always been fascinated with deviant behavior in history, and for that alone I thought highly of The Gangs of New York.
I read it with great pleasure, and I choose to believe it. Herbert asbusrys Gangs of New York remains a masterpiece of Urban mythology. If you too choose to do so, you will gain immense pleasure from it, if you are at all into raw meat, revolvers, opium, drunken sailors, butcher knives, turpentine, plug hats and witty comebacks. It's accuracy is constantly questioned by killjoy historians and researchers (yes, the same kind of people who take joy in in de-romantisizing the world by constantly trying to prove that there were no gunfighters in the old West and that there is no life on other planets and that medieval knights actually never indulged in warfare and were only armed with sticks and rocks for fighting off varmint). The stories in Gangs of New York are epic, dark and brooding tales, indeed reminiscent of Irish hero myths and with all the quirks and kinks of Scandinavian folk-tales. I know I am.
I paid a buck for this, and after a couple of chapters, I knew this is not for everyone. I'd read of the draft riots in the Civil War-era USA, but had absolutely no idea of the anarchy of New York. After 100 pages, it's time to lay this down for a while, and while yes, the book was written in the 1920's, the prose isn't nearly as archaic as some books.
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