Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Well, I'm only on page 110, but I couldn't resist being the first reader reviewer (disclosure: Barnet and I went to school together). This is a highly engaging and detailed account of the urban paroxysm of 1863, but it's more than that. Having chronicled the siege of New York during the Revolutionary War in his first book, Schecter has turned to the second of the city's three major conflagrations (the third being of course 9/11, with the nearly bloodless English victory over the Dutch in 1664 not really counting) and has produced an essential addition to any self-respecting shelf on the world's greatest city.
Many people these days may have formed their main impressions of the riots from the last scenes of Martin Scorsese's film "Gangs of New York." The reality given here is quite different but even more shocking. And although "The Devil's Own Work" is similarly peopled by colorful and often grotesque characters, its mood is if anything more like Luc Sante's books, or like the original "Gangs" by Herbert Asbury. More importantly, Schecter's book is incisive and very readable military history. One of the book's most thoughtful features is a "walking tour" appendix which points out almost all the key locations in the text, some of which are still enough like their 1864 selves to give you a touch of the time-traveler's shiver -- or is it more of a prescient apprehension that events very much like these could easily happen here again?
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