May 26, 2012 · www.gothamgazette.com

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Best Books About Immigrants

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Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York
by Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán (editor) (Temple Univ Press, 2001.)

In this ambitious book, nineteen scholars from a broad range of disciplines bring our understanding of New York's immigrant communities up to date by exploring the interaction between economic globalization and transnationalization, demographic change, and the evolving racial, ethnic, gender dynamics in the City. Urban and suburban, Asian, European, Latin American, and Caribbean, men and women and children—the essays here analyze the complex forces that shape the contemporary immigrant experience in New York City and the links between immigrant communities in New York and their countries of origin. Temple University Press more info...

New Immigrants in New York
by Nancy Foner (Columbia University Press, 2001.)

This book brings together contributions from leaders in their respective fields to show how new immigrants are transforming the city -and how New York, in turn, has affected the newcomers´ lives. The contributors consider the four largest groups -Dominicans, former Soviets, Chinese, and Jamaicans -as well as Mexicans, Koreans, and West Africans. An introduction highlights the groups' commonalities and differences. The book also includes an analysis of the city´s altered demographic structure and its labor market. Columbia University Press more info...

Strangers at the Gates
by Roger Waldinger (The University of California Press, 2001.)

Immigration is remaking the United States. In New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Chicago, the multiethnic society of tomorrow is already in place. Yet today's urban centers appear unlikely to provide newcomers with the same opportunities their predecessors found at the turn of the last century. The University of California Press more info...

World of Our Fathers
by Irving Howe (Simon and Schuster, 1976.)

Howe's book helps preserve a vanishing culture. Some of it has been absorbed into the New York idiom, just as every immigrant group before and since has contributed flavor to the ethnic stew. It helps the reader understand conflicts resulting from ethnic succession. New York Times more info...

Reader Submissions / Others.

• Forever by Pete Hamill. "Forever," an overblown tall tale about an Irish immortal confined to the island of Manhattan, traffics in some interesting ideas about the universal nature of myth and the powerful correspondences between the first two non-Anglo immigrant groups to transform America, the Irish and the Africans. (New York Times Book Review)

• Gangs Of New York by Various. The movie "Gangs Of New York," directed by Martin Scorcese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day Lewis, has brought renewed attention to the city's long colorful history of criminal gangs, and especially to the Five Points, which historian Edwin Burrows calls "New York's most infamous neighborhood, singled out by generations of reformers and journalists as a hive of nightmarish squalor, violence, disease and crime." (Book list compiled by Gotham Gazette)

Interested in other books about NYC? Visit our NYC Books section.

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