In a city of eight million people, could you come up with a short list of the really notable ones? The difficult becomes nearly impossible when you go back through the nearly 400 years of New York City history.
But Sam Roberts, who has long covered the city for the New York Times and written books about it, took on the task and delivered a surprisingly short list: The New Yorkers: 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City.
The woman who sued a bus company for discrimination a century before Rosa Parks, a mobster banished by the mayor, the woman whose farm in Manhattan set off a legal dispute lasting centuries... these and more are the characters of the book. The author visits with details.