Tenements, Towers and Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History Of New York City
by Julia Wertz
Buy on AmazonA New York Times Notable Book of 2017! Here is New York, as you've never seen it before. A perfectly charming, sidesplittingly funny, intellectually entertaining illustrated history of the blocks, the buildings, and the guts of New York City, based on Julia Wertz's popular illustrated columns in The New Yorker and Harper's. In Tenements, Towers & Trash, Julia Wertz takes us behind the New York that you think you know. Not the tourist's New York-the Statue of Liberty makes a brief appearance and the Empire State Building not at all-but the guts, the underbelly, of this city that never sleeps.…
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"This book is an epic achievement in comics. Wertz has drawn dozens of New York streetscapes, past and present, in meticulous detail, presenting them in an oversized tome of 300+ pages. Her love for the city is tangible and moving, even as she highlights its freaks and failures. Her style distinguishes her from other artists who’ve chronicled the city scene. Cool, stripped-down renderings function as a kind of visual democracy: Dead or alive, all her subjects get a fair shake at capturing the reader’s interest."
NPR Books We Love — 2017 · apps.npr.org