Customer Reviews

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a great book for those interested in the roots of New Yorks dark side. There is much more to this book than what was made into the recent movie with the same title and the book even shows how the movie was not made 100% accurate. Being written in the early 1900s this book can give you a window to a time long gone. If you know about New York and its areas then this book may fascinate you but if not it could be boring. But I give it an A plus rating.

This book surprised me from the very beginning when I discovered it was written in the 1920s... (For some reason, I thought it was written a few years ago)

Having LOVED the recent movie by Martin Scorcese... I thought this book would unfold as a historical drama/love story surrounded by all of those strange but endearing underworld characters.

As I read on, I found many of the same characters, but they were now in an entirely different story. This book is nothing like the movie... although, honestly, I was not disappointed in it at all.

I enjoy reading about historical events that are not really taught in school. The detailed descriptions of the draft riots were interesting and horrifying at the same time. With half a dozen 'negros' being lynched every day for a week... (and many people think that racism only existed in the south during the Civil War) How many people know that Union forces fired Artillery into crowds. Artillery. Cannons... Lincoln is a popular president today, but can you imagine Bill Clinton authorizing the US Army to fire a howitzer into the crowd during the LA riots...?

Anyway, I liked this book very much and I would recommend it to anyone who reads and enjoys American history. New York is an old city with many stories... this is one of them.

The Gangs of New York is a fascinating chunk of controversial history (some question its accuracy), an interesting period piece written nearly 90 years ago-- but fans of the highly-touted film should BEWARE if they're expecting for something closely related to the Martin Scorese flick.

Even so, no matter what anyone (including yours truly) says...and awful lot of people of all ages READ this book -- and love it. I was recently on a flight and sat next to a guy in his early 20s who sat there fascinated, reading it during the entire 3 hour flight.

Gangs of New York is NOT your typical book on which a movie is based. If it's bought by someone who loves the film somebody is going to be in for a monster surprise (or disappointment). Don't expect a plot, don't expect compelling writing, don't expect a large section on which the book is based and to easily find those sections. But do expect to be fascinated.

WHAT THIS IS: This is a book about: early brutal gang warfare, during a time in the 19th century where gangs literally swarmed all over New York City; blow-by-blow bloody battles and legendary gang fighters in a city virtually in the grip of gangs -- leading to the creation of the NY City Police department; and the politically dominating Tammany Hall machine's birth and growth in the 19th and 20th centuries, set within the context of a politically corrupt, violence-prone city.

Most interestingly, it's about a time in NYC's history that you seldom see portrayed in films or in books. I found the accounts of the 1863 Civil War draft riots absolutely gripping. But mostly it's about the gangs with names such as Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies etc (the film used these names too). Many illustrations are old-style drawings rather than photos.

WHAT IT DOES: Gangs of New York gives you a good history seemingly based on interviews and mountains of old newspaper clippings, most of it in anecdotal versus dry statistical form.

WHAT IT IS NOT: It is not a book written in a modern prose style, but it isn't boring. It doesn't have a "plot" with a beginning, middle and end. No, it doesn't have a hero, or anyone resembling Leonardo, a love subplot, etc.

But if you're interested in the acclaimed movie's source material and learning about a fascinating and often forgotten period in NY City's municipal history you'll love it. Even though it was out of print for many years The Gangs of New York has been a legend itself for many years -- and it easy to see why.

As much as I liked its topic, I found the book confused and confusing. It's mostly unclear in which time some events take place, while indications of place are mostly too detailed. It may have been difficult to come up with enough material for all the illustrous characters, but if there are gaps, why not just say so? Asbury makes clear at the beginning that this is not an academic treatise, but that does not give him the right to become unclear.

The best parts are the minute descriptions of the Police and the Draft riots, and I found the beginning quite gripping, but the book soon lacks its initial zeal and focus, and the biographical descriptions did not live up to their subjects. There is a surprising lack of enthusiasm on Asbury's part. You don't have to love your subject - you may even hate it -, but your interest should, to a degree, affect the reader.

For a book that purports to be a saga of history, "Gangs of New York" reads more like myth. Asbury's writing style inclines one to believe these are tales he's fabricated in the back of some bar rather than discover them in the depths of a research library. Though certain accounts (such as that of the Draft Riots) are certainly historically accurate, some passages read like sections of Paul Bunyan tall tales, including one detailing a gangster who had the lung-power to blow ships out of the East River.

Whether Asbury meant to mix fact and legend so fluently is unspecified. Still, even a figurative reading of the book seems a bit to colloquial. For a tale of "blood and gore" it was unexpectedly boring, owing to the sometimes overdetailed accounts of gang-related occurrences. This is one work for which I can say the movie is far more entertaining- though, of course, the movie mixes and matches aspects of the book at will, making it a sort of second derivative attempt.

Read Asbury's book as a sort of escapist crime drama, not as a serious historical work chronicling what was happening on the streets of New York.

Asbury's book is highly readable, full of blood and thunder, loads of colorful characters and as many tall tales as there are pages. The book isn't so much a history as it is an impression. What Asbury captures is clearly an impression of the Five Points and its gangs in the public consciousness and folklore. This is a sort of "if it didn't happen this way, it should have" bit of storytelling. If you want actual history, look elsewhere. If you want a strong taste of American folklore, start reading. As has been noted, this isn't the story you'll find in the Scorcese film. And that's good. Reading "The Gangs of New York" actually illuminates the movie. You'll get a greater, grander sense of what Scorcese is getting at in his film. The book and the film are about American mythmaking. As Jimmy Stewart says at the end of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "when legend become fact, print the legend."

I don't think this book would have a chance at notoriety if not for the movie. It's written in a trite style and I always felt as if I couldn't count on the stories as being true rather than hearsay or exaggeration. As someone else said, the book reads as if it were being told at a bar. I couldn't finish it. Maybe I was looking for something more historical or scholarly but then I received it as a gift. I understand the movie plays loose with the book, so where are we at?

Reading some of the reviews of this book makes me wonder what people were expecting when they bought it. This is pure tabloid history, of the type that one might have read in installments in the old "Liberty" magazine of the same time period.

Sure, some of it was tall tales, but they were written as such, and a reader would have to be an idiot to think the author was writing these to be believed as pure fact.

This may not be a college press sociological publlication with a bibliography longer than the actual text of the book itself, but when it was written, in the late 20's, that's not what a reader would have expected from a writer like Asbury. The book sets out to entertain, and I think it succeeds in this.

I found this in an used book store about 10 years ago, read it and it became an immediate favorite. I remember thinking at the time "somebody should make a movie of this", and now someone has done it. It's a good introduction to the basic events it describes. If one becomes more interested in these events, then one could delve into more scholarly tomes on the events. The past few years has seen a number of such tomes come out on these subjects, and I bet most of the authors were introduced to the study by Asbury's book.

I can understand that to some who don't live or work in New York, the place and street and neighborhood names might mean nothing, but if one is REALLY interested, one could get a street map of the city, or a travel guide from a public library to use as reference while reading the book. I happen to be from New York and work every day in the very area in which much of the action in this book takes place: Baxter and Mercer and Greene and Wooster Streets, etc., so the book may mean more to me than to a reader in, say, Dallas. But if you say "I ain't going thru all that trouble to get reference just to read this book", then you're not really that interested in the book. When I read about the Kennedy assassination, f'rinstance, and it describes areas and streets and neighborhoods in a city I am unfamiliar with (Dallas) I get a map. It makes the reading more interesting and gives the reader a better idea of what's going on.

By the way, if one is interested in further reading on this subject, I can recommend two further books. Both are old and out-of-print for years, but well worth finding. One is actually a novel, "An Original Belle" , written in 1885 by a now forgotten novelist, EP Roe. It is set in New York City during the Civil War, and gives one of the longest and best description of the draft riots I've read. Though this IS a novel, you can see that the author,who lived through the events and wrote this just a little over 20 years after the occurences, did deep research on the subject and wrote that section of the book as factual, detailed history. It serves as the dramatic climax of the novel, and because of that is kind of unique.

The second book is "Tammany Hall" by M. R. Werner, a magazine writer of the time (published in 1932). Less of a tall tale teller than Asbury, this book sticks to facts and the facts are eye-opening to say the least. The book is journalistic in style, but also VERY detailed. It is essential reading, and ties up very well the connection between street gangs, volunteer fire companies, political clubs, the NYC police, and the institution of Tammany Hall, from the lowly ward heeler all the way to the governor's mansion in Albany. It's hard to find, but worth the effort.

Herbert Asbury's "Gangs of New York" was an expose first published in 1927. Its style shows its age: reading this book is like listening to an old 1920's newspaper reporter from the far end of the bar after he's had too many drinks: lots of exotic tall tales of life in the gritty city; countless names and places rise and disappear never to be heard again. The overall effect is entertaining but completely unbelievable, as though Paul Bunyon had moved to the Lower East Side of 19th-century Manhattan.

One illustration will suffice: the early gangster "Mighty Mose" is describe as 'at least 8 feet tall' wearing boots studded with inch-long spikes.On one occasion Asbury has Mose pulling an oak tree out of the ground by its roots to 'smite' some of a rival gang, the Dead Rabbits. On another the author claims Mose swam underwater from Manhattan to Staten Island without coming up for air. It comes off as the kind of book a boy would have hidden in a corncrib to read when it was first published in 1927: lowlife fun, but if you're looking for the real history, you will be disappointed.

You will be even FURTHER disappointed if you expect the book to resemble the new Scorcese movie in any manner. Although Scorcese borrows the names of characters from the book - Bill the Butcher, Jack Scirocco, Vallon, Everdeane - and sets the movie around the time of the 1863 Draft Riots, which really occured - in the book these characters are sometimes separated by 50 years and 100 pages. The character played by Leonardo diCaprio, Amsterdam Vallon, does not appear at all in the book.

I first read the book before the movie was filmed, because of my interest in New York history. It's entertaining although the writing style is pretty archaic. But if you came to this page looking for the 'true story' behind the movie, you won't find it here.

Readers who purchase this book because they enjoyed the movie of the same name might find it challenging to determine just how the two works are connected (besides both being set in New York, and both involving gangs). It is more accurate to say that the Martin Scorcese film was "inspired by people and events" portrayed in this book. The book itself lacks the unifying narrative thread of the movie; it rushes and swerves frantically among countless colorful vignettes and covers many decades in the history of the New York City underworld. The book is a superb example of journalism from the 1910s and 1920s, i.e. fast and loose with the facts and interested primarily in generating a "sensation." However, to modern readers this style may prove frustrating, even distracting. I think that this book will remain far more interesting to historians of journalism than to fans of the DiCaprio movie.