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The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld | 
 enlarge | Author: Herbert Asbury
Creator: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 104910
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 366
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 1560252758
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.106097471
EAN: 9781560252757
ASIN: 1560252758
Publication Date: October 10, 2001
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Product Description
The Gangs of New York has long been hand-passed among its cult readership. It is a tour through a now unrecognizable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence cobbled, as Luc Sante has written, "from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, and solid historical research." Asbury presents the definitive work on this subject, an illumination of the gangs of old New York that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia and its depiction in films like The Godfather. "A universal history of infamy [that] contains all the confusion and cruelty of the barbarian cosmologies...."—Jorge Luis Borges "The tale is one of blood, excitement and debauchery."—The New York Times Book Review "The Gangs of New York is one of the essential works of the city...."—Luc Sante, The New York Review of Books
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| Customer Reviews: Read 48 more reviews...
1928 expose of gangs shows it age August 15, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I became interested in reading The Gangs of New York after reading about the Triangle Factory fire and the influence of Tammany Hall in both. I first watched the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. The movie takes a few characters from the nonfiction book and shuffles them in with fictional characters and then dramatizes the whole bit. I didn't really enjoy the movie, but after reading the book, I can definitely see its influence. Gangs picks up with the gangs around 1840 in the Bowery, the Five Points area. Asbury's details about the gangs of this period are fascinating, and the characters are incredibly colorful. But along with Asbury's tale of crime, he also creates a heartbreaking story of the fight for survival in New York during this time. Americans born here resented immigrants and the immigrants turned on each other. Poverty was grinding and devastating; you almost can't blame the residents for turning to crime just to survive. The book really takes off in its description of The Draft Riots of 1863. The riots swept the city destroying buildings and nearly entire neighborhoods. The death toll equalled that of some of the worst battles of the Civil War. The compelling tales end around the turn of the century and become just recitations of murder and revenge without placing them in the context of the times. The book was originally released in 1928 so there are several outdated racist terms, and Asbury uses quite of a bit of bigotry when referring to the Chinese. I do wish that in this new edition some updated information could have been added along with more pictures. It's hard for me to imagine someone named Ida the Goose as inspiring a gang war that left several men dead. Pictures are definitely required!
Great work of cultural history January 25, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The Gangs of New York is an introduction to the gangs which proliferated in New York, primarily in the notorious Five Points district on the Lower East Side, in the nineteenth century. We're introduced to a number of famous characters, from the mythological Mose with his superhuman strength, to Bill the Butcher, to the Whyo gang, to the tong wars of Chinatown, and to the Monk Eastman gang and Big Jack Zelig. Although the book is introduced as a work of sociology, it's more a book of popular and cultural history.
Many of the tales Asbury tells on this book are based on rumor and myth and often it's not quite clear what's factual. Also, the language itself is a little old-fashioned, and Asbury is blatantly racist at times (take this sentence, for example: "[The Bloody Angle in Doyers Street, in Chinatown] was, and is, an ideal place for ambush; the turn is very abrupt, and not even a slant-eyed Chinaman can see around a corner." (p. 286)). The Gangs of New York is also dated in that the author will say something like, "such-and-such is located at such-and-such address, where now there's a such-and-such." The New York City that Asbury wrote about was obviously much different from what it is now.
But this volume is nonetheless an excellent introduction to the gangs of New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You don't even have to know too much about the city's history in order to enjoy the book. I've always been fascinated with deviant behavior in history, and for that alone I thought highly of The Gangs of New York.
 A dark and brooding saga January 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Herbert asbusrys Gangs of New York remains a masterpiece of Urban mythology. It's accuracy is constantly questioned by killjoy historians and researchers (yes, the same kind of people who take joy in in de-romantisizing the world by constantly trying to prove that there were no gunfighters in the old West and that there is no life on other planets and that medieval knights actually never indulged in warfare and were only armed with sticks and rocks for fighting off varmint). The stories in Gangs of New York are epic, dark and brooding tales, indeed reminiscent of Irish hero myths and with all the quirks and kinks of Scandinavian folk-tales. I read it with great pleasure, and I choose to believe it. If you too choose to do so, you will gain immense pleasure from it, if you are at all into raw meat, revolvers, opium, drunken sailors, butcher knives, turpentine, plug hats and witty comebacks. I know I am!
 The movie was tame December 20, 2007
I paid a buck for this, and after a couple of chapters, I knew this is not for everyone. I'd read of the draft riots in the Civil War-era USA, but had absolutely no idea of the anarchy of New York. After 100 pages, it's time to lay this down for a while, and while yes, the book was written in the 1920's, the prose isn't nearly as archaic as some books.
Too good to be true May 9, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Herbert Asbury has developed in this book a delightfully readable (and read-out-loudable) history of the dark underbelly of New York City--the picaresque and downright nasty underground of gambling tongs, gang warfare and thorough political corruption.
I of course came to this book only recently, after having seen the Scorsese film of the same name. It is in fact quite wonderful to see the liberties Scorsese took to make a challenging film and not just a recapping of this oral-style history. Familiar names and events and places appear in the mist, but in a whole new context. This book will let you know that the incredible Scorsese movie merely scratches the surface of the NYC underworld from the Civil War era to the start of the 20th dentury, if this book is to be believed.
It is this last point that gives me some pause about this book. As I said before, this book is eminently readable and enjoyable. The webs of rivalry and alliance, of rumbles that go on for hours, riots that go on for days, tales of violence and retribution and a host of characters whose corruption and indulgence o'ershadow even the prohibition days of Chicago. Asbury freely admits when some of his tales are mere folklore, stories that criminals pass along to each other as legends, drastically overexaggerrated to confer the level of respect of awe that a gang leader or significant change of the balance of power has earned.
But sometimes it's hard to believe the level of reliable research that could have gone into so many other ta1es. The histories of particular criminals are detailed down to their dismemberment by cannon fire in the Civil War, or their miserable ends to cowardly ambush or the breaking of spirits after a particularly bad loss of business or to a mightier opponent, or to their incarceration, and the mug shots are wonderfully stylish, but it is hard to stomach easily the thoroughness of the information, unless Asbury was a devotee of the Five Corners and other such areas of ill-repute in its heyday. No doubt there was prodigious information provided by police records and other data, but perhaps this is a book to be taken more as a work of social anthropology than history--an examination of the underworld culture of NYC in this time period rather than a necessarily accurate historical document. One part bragging, another part horror, and a wonderful gaze at the debaucheries of the ale houses and gambling establishments down Asbury's nose in a way that seems sometimes sincere, sometimes a little over the top for the sake of appearances, this book is worth the read, especially to spread stories to others...just don't accept it readily as 'fact.'
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