Amy Werbel's Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock

Reviewed by Marcela Micucci

Anthony Comstock was a household name in nineteenth-century America, so much so that his last name became synonymous with a movement and set of laws that sought to censor obscenity and eradicate vice. Historian Amy Werbel explores this anti-obscenity movement — and its champion — in her provocative and cutting-edge work, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (2018).

Gender & Sexuality, Gilded Age, Politics, Progressive Era, ReviewsGuest UserJune 19, 2018Anthony ComstockComment

Cartooning the City: Roz Chast and Julia Wertz

Reviewed by Martin Lund

When I was asked by Gotham to review Roz Chast’s Going into Town: A Love Letter to New Yorkand Julie Wertz’s Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City, I had no idea what to expect. Both writer-illustrators are known for tackling a wide variety of topics, albeit most commonly personal subjects. Both Chast and Wertz work in styles of art and storytelling that are readily identifiable, even as their work always delivers something new. With this in mind, all I knew for certain when I said yes to the request to review was that I would be getting two books of graphic arts that dealt with New York City, and that I would be able to tell who had done which book. Anything else, it seemed to me, was anybody’s guess. How the two would relate to each other was similarly up for grabs; they could be boringly similar or wildly different.

Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, ReviewsGuest UserJune 12, 2018Comment

Anne Fleming's City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance

Reviewed by Erin Cully

The commercial streets in Flatbush are dotted with storefronts advertising rent-to-own furniture sets and appliances. Pawnbrokers and payday lenders call out to passersby, promising “dollars now” in exchange for gold or a paycheck. Many Americans are accustomed to buying consumer goods by swiping a credit card, but for low-income families in New York and elsewhere, access to credit is limited. Small-sum lenders, pawnbrokers, and furniture stores offering installment plans are often the only recourse for households whose economic circumstances threaten to deny them access to the consumption habits that have defined American freedom for most of the twentieth century. These forms of credit have a high price tag, and goods purchased can end up costing several times more than if bought in cash. Families denied access to conventional forms of credit know all too well how “extremely expensive it is to be poor,” as James Baldwin put it.

Business & Labor, Poverty & Inequality, ReviewsGuest UserMay 24, 2018Comment

Eddy Portnoy's Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories From the Yiddish Press

Reviewed by Tamar Rabinowitz

In April of last year, a play about a play became a surprise Broadway hit. The Pulitzer Prize winning Indecent recounted the making of renowned Yiddish playwright, Shalom Asch’s 1906 God of Vengeance — a story of a wealthy, exploitative, and violent Jewish brothel owner eager to marry off his daughter to a respectable scholar. A tale about faith, hypocrisy, sexuality, and deceit, God of Vengeance unearthed the unsavory aspects of Eastern European Jewish life, leaving contemporaries to wonder if it “was good for the Jews?”

Progressive Era, Race & Ethnicity, Religion, ReviewsGuest UserApril 17, 2018Comment

Ruinous, Bleak and a Bitter Sense of Freedom

By Jeffrey Escoffier

Photography, at least before the digital era, has a special relationship to history. Unlike other visual images, photographs are ‘traces’ of what they portray— they are the direct result of light reflected from objects in front of the camera onto a chemical emulsion. The photographic trace is recorded at a moment of time and then stored for future viewing; it is, thus, automatically an historical representation. According to cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, the historical significance of photographs rests on their capacity to record things normally unnoticed at the time.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserApril 12, 2018Comment

Jennifer Packard's A Taste of Broadway: Food in Musical Theater

Reviewed by Morgen Stevens-Garmon

“Food, glorious food” sing the workhouse boys of Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver!, and so too sings Jennifer Packard in her new book A Taste of Broadway: food in musical theater, the latest offering in Rowman & Littlefield’s series, Studies in Food and Gastronomy. Part food history, part musical theater analysis, and part cookbook, A Taste of Broadway presents a flavorful if slightly confused dish.

Arts & Culture, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserApril 5, 2018Comment

Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect at the Bronx Museum of the Arts

By Craig Lee

In an unexpected but deft move, Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect at the Bronx Museum of Arts (November 8, 2017 to April 8, 2018) begins in the lobby above the XM Café — a partnership with Fountain House, a community program supporting people with mental illness. Upon entering the museum, accessible to all through the free admission policy, visitors turn and see an open seating area filled with tables and chairs with the café’s food and beverage service counter against the back wall. Above, where one might find a menu display board, instead is the introductory wall panel for the exhibition. Rather than providing a comprehensive survey of Gordon Matta-Clark’s too brief (he died of pancreatic cancer in 1978 at 35 years of age), but prolific and influential creative practice in the 1970s, the exhibition is tightly organized around a handful of key projects and explorations.

Arts & Culture, Bronx, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserMarch 20, 2018Comment

Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Reviewed by Jocelyn A Wills

One never knows where a family heirloom will lead. Brooklyn’s Renaissance began with a cultural artifact that Italian Renaissance scholar Melissa Meriam Bullard’s mother inherited from a distant cousin: a portrait of Luther Boynton Wyman (1804-79), a forgotten shipping merchant for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line, long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights, and “guiding hand” in the founding of the “arts-friendly community” along Montague Street during the 1850s and 1860s (with the Academy of Music, now “BAM,” as Brooklyn’s cultural center).

Brooklyn, Antebellum & Civil War, Arts & Culture, Business & Labor, Reviews, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserFebruary 20, 2018Comment

The Unruly City: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution

Reviewed by Miriam Liebman

In recent years, scholars have published numerous books on the Age of Revolutions and the connections between the countries involved; usually the United States, Great Britain, and France. These books have focused on people and ideas. But in The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolution, Mike Rapport, a professor of modern European history at the University of Glasgow, takes a different approach, focusing instead on the geography of “the city” and how it may or may not have been more conducive to revolution. Venturing into the transatlantic history of revolution, he is concerned principally with the importance of place to success and failure particularly the ways “spaces and buildings in these cities both symbolically and physically became places of conflict, how the cityscape itself became part of the experience of revolution and may even have helped shaped its course.” For Rapport, space itself has agency, which in this study has two meanings: a specific place or the city, itself. The Unruly City explores not only how New York City’s (and London’s and Paris’s) landscape propelled and hindered democratic revolution, but also how people interacted with the urban geography.

Early Republic, ReviewsGuest UserFebruary 13, 2018Comment

Can this Mayor Save NYC?

Reviewed by Bruce Berg

Over the last half century, every New York City mayor has been the subject of at least one, if not more, published works. There is clearly a consensus that mayors merit this level of attention and scrutiny, and book-length examinations of the city’s mayors have been both journalistic and academic. The current mayor, William (Bill) de Blasio is no exception to this treatment. Two works, one by New York Daily News journalist Juan González (Reclaiming Gotham) and the other by CUNY professor Joseph Viteritti (The Pragmatist), offer the preliminary narrative on the current mayor. What makes these manuscripts interesting is that both were written before the end of Mayor de Blasio’s first term. And while both offer the reader an examination of the political roots of Bill de Blasio and a discussion of his early accomplishments as mayor, five years from now readers will want to know more about the progress made over his two terms as mayor. Is there a reason why these authors should not have waited a little longer to publish their work? Possibly. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than five to one, Bill de Blasio is the first Democratic mayor elected in twenty years (five terms). Equally as important, de Blasio is only the second progressive Democratic mayor to be elected in recent years, with the support of minorities, municipal labor unions and progressive white voters; and the first of these mayors to be elected to a second term. And although Bill de Blasio was not a political unknown prior to being elected mayor, he clearly lacked the name recognition and the visibility of his two predecessors. So after twenty years of governance from the center of the political spectrum, the de Blasio mayoralty returned New York City to its liberal/progressive roots. As a result, New Yorkers want to know who this man is, what his origins are — political and otherwise — and how he might lead the city and its governing institutions. Mr. González and Professor Viteritti address these issues.

Contemporary Era, Politics, ReviewsGuest UserJanuary 16, 2018Comment

Amy Werbel's Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock

Reviewed by Marcela Micucci

Cartooning the City: Roz Chast and Julia Wertz

Reviewed by Martin Lund

Anne Fleming's City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance

Reviewed by Erin Cully

Eddy Portnoy's Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories From the Yiddish Press

Reviewed by Tamar Rabinowitz

Ruinous, Bleak and a Bitter Sense of Freedom

By Jeffrey Escoffier

Jennifer Packard's A Taste of Broadway: Food in Musical Theater

Reviewed by Morgen Stevens-Garmon

Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect at the Bronx Museum of the Arts

By Craig Lee

Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Reviewed by Jocelyn A Wills

The Unruly City: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution

​Reviewed by Miriam Liebman

Can this Mayor Save NYC?

Reviewed by Bruce Berg

Reviewed by Miriam Liebman