Manhattan '45 [Paperback]

Jan Morris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 1998

In 1945, New York City stood at the pinnacle of its cultural and economic power. Never again would the city possess the unique mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality, generosity and confidence which characterized it in this moment of triumph. In Manhattan '45, acclaimed travel writer and historian Jan Morris evokes the city in all its romantic grandeur. From its beguilingly idiosyncratic architectural style to its unmistakable slang, post-War New York springs to life through Morris's brisk, affectionate prose. Morris visits Wall Street, Harlem, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. She rides the trollies, the El, the Hudson River ferries, and the Twentieth Century Limited. She dines at Schrafft's and Le Pavillon, drinks ale at McSorley's Saloon, sips Manhattans at the Manhattan Club, and spots celebrities at El Morocco. She meets Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, Leo Durocher, I. B. Singer, and Dizzy Gillespie. And she tours the tenements of Hell's Kitchen and the Gashouse district, as well as the Foundling Hospital where the crushing realities of poverty belie the unchallenged exuberance of the age. Taking into account both Social Register and slum, Manhattan '45 celebrates New York's Golden Age as a place where, for one unrepeatable moment in history, anything seemed possible.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Noted travel writer Morris takes us on a trip to the Manhattan of 1945. The Queen Mary docked in New York City on June 20, 1945, with the first major contingent of troops returning from the European battlefield. Morris has us join those returning troops in touring a city poised on the brink of a brilliant future. We celebrate Manhattan in all its glory and ignominyits politics, its business, its entertainment, its culture, its various races, classes, and ethnic groups. Vivid descriptions and diverting anecdotes of life make for a fascinating and enjoyable tour. Morris conveys the excitement of being in New York City as it awakens to a new age in a book that will absorb all lovers of Manhattan. Pat Ensor, Indiana State Univ. Lib., Terre Haute
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

A fine and fun bebop Baedeker through the Grandest of all Cities, New York, in its 1945 heyday..a valuable and thoroughly enjoyable journey.

(Gregg Ottinger American Studies International )

Morris's rendition of the city's 1945 moods conveys what it felt like to live in New York at that time... A book crammed with details that bring life again to a city that glows in one's memory.

(New York Times Book Review )

Vivid descriptions and diverting anecdotes of life make for a fascinating and enjoyable tour. Morris conveys the excitement of being in New York City as it awakens to a new age in a book that will absorb all lovers of Manhattan.

(Library Journal )

Accomplished with a surprising feeling of immediacy... Morris's unabashedly sentimental journey is narrated in a breezy, sometimes gushing style, yet maintains a high level of accuracy... There are intriguing bits of information and insight that spotlight aspects of the city we may have taken for granted... Manhattan '45... provides some food for thought, some fine writing, but mostly, just fun.

(Christian Science Monitor )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 282 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (June 5, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801859573
• ISBN-13: 978-0801859571
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #772,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Sense of Place, September 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Manhattan '45 (Paperback)

Few books on New York's past are as rich and revealing as this work. The author does an excellent job of recreating the sense of place of New York. Urban culture, economy, and race relations are dealt with in a very creative way. I found that while its focus is the New York of the 1940s this book really is about a larger American experience that reaches into our day.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading for Lovers of New York, April 19, 2007

By 

Renee Thorpe (Karangasem, Bali) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manhattan '45 (Paperback)

Jan Morris' favorite city is presented in its moment of greatest hope, when the war was won and America was in a blissful state indeed.

Morris always writes beautifully of places as characters in and of themselves. These are usually distilled in essay form to show up some single, wonderful characteristic of the place. She's always done that better than any other travel writer, even if it sounds like pigeon-holing. But this amazing book does anything but pigeonhole.

Morris has composed a kind of love letter about the city, expanding on race, class, and its sheer motion. There's a great deal of history inside, giving a little background and color to how Manhattan came to be what it was in 1945. Mayors and miscellaneous cranks, celebrities and neighborhood personalities all share the stage.

It's a book of history, trivia, memories, gossip, and sheer fun. Gorgeously written. A MUST for Manhattanites and fans of the Big Apple.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A highwayscribery "Book Report", May 1, 2009

By 

Stephen Siciliano "the highway scribe" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Manhattan '45 (Paperback)

Jan Morris does such a great job of recreating New York City - Manhattan - in its golden moment that a fun exercise for a writer would be to draft some characters and weave them throughout the structure of this entertaining text and see what comes out.

Morris establishes a framework for his study, a Manhattan that is the last great city standing in the wake of World War II, the product of a recent building boom and sturdy enough to handle the business of two continents rather than one.

Intelligently broken up into novel but digestible categories such as style, system, movement, race and class, Manhattan '45 manages to tell a story while not getting lost in the complexity of its remarkable topic.

Morris writes light and breezy like some of the newspaper columnists of era mentioned and one can't help but wonder the extent to which the place and era have come to infuse the writers technique.

Reeling through the '40s requires a certain degree of listing. The listing of names, the listing of places and eateries, the listing and Manhattan's less-that-evocative grid of numbered streets and avenues, but Morris drops in just enough prosody to make it work as in the passage about the nightlife so typical of the work:

"The Beau Nash of Manhattan, though, was Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club. Where but the Stork Club could one see Cobina Wright, "the city's loveliest debutante" in the same room as H.L. Mencken, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or the Ernest Hemingways? Billingsley, known to his often fawning customers as 'Sherm,' at once basked in their reflected fame and vigorously exploited it. He employed two teams of press agents, one on day shift, one on night, and he assiduously cultivated the friendship of newspapers columnists like Walter Winchell (the King), or Leonard Lyons, of the 'The Lyons Den,' who were by then celebrities themselves. Some said he had actually invented Cafe Society; he had first advertised his club in college newspapers, and given publicity to suitably prepossessing and sufficiently moneyed students as "prominent members of Cafe Society."

The author's passion for Manhattan shines throughout and is so infectious even the odd reader who picks up the book because nothing else is at hand may catch the fever.