Curious and strange, most of the stories in this book make for delightful reading and provide a colourful historical backdrop for the current New York to be viewed against. Unfortunately, though, the author is not all that trustworthy (an easy to check example is his assertion that cops are called that because New York’s police wore copper stars, which is false), and never provides sources for any of his claims, not even the more outlandish ones. It might be suspected that the stories actually tell us more about how people in the 1920s pictured the history of New York than about the actual history itself, but that itself has become historical now, and it certainly is entertaining.
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