Low Life, by Luc Sante, is FASCINATING and a cracking good read.

Heh. Hec was just raving about that book last night to my brother and spouse, who are newly New Yorkers and not fully steeped in its history as yet.

Also, anything by Herbert Asbury (The French Quarter, The Barbary Coast, Gangs of New York). His books are simultaneously narrower and broader than 19th century history -- each one focuses on a single city or region, and explores everything worth hearing about both before and after the 19th cent. -- but they're great, snarky, lively books crammed with deliciously low, nasty, murderous history. There's so much glorious filth that has played a huge part in shaping the character of our greatest cities, and most of it never makes it into the official texts.

David McCullough does a great job, and his recent popularity means they've reissued his earlier books, which I think are his best. That includes Johnstown Flood; Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge; Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt; and Path Between The Seas : The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914. If he's particularly interested in New York, the Brooklyn Bridge book is really good.

There's also my campaign to get everyone to read The Education of Henry Adams.

Was he reading the Edmund Morris TR biography? Because that's in the TBR stack on my table (not to be confused with the TBR stack by the bed).

Nope. This one is by Kathleen Dalton. We picked it up when we were on vacation in Cape Cod.

I was looking at Gangs of New York. Thanks, JZ.

The movie of that really sucked somehow, but if I knew how, I'd be posting in a bigger house. Casting Cameron Diaz as a hard-living prostitute? Not the Scorsese brilliance at work, though.

The movie of that really sucked somehow, but if I knew how, I'd be posting in a bigger house.

It felt like there was another hour that got left on the cutting room floor, for one thing (thanks for nothing, Harvey Scissorhands), but I'm not sure more would have made it any better.

I would love to see a face-off between Bill the Butcher and Al Swearingen, though.

...and now back to the topic of books.

That would be cool, Frank.

I was hoping for more of a non-fiction history book

The Triumph of Conservatism by Gabriel Kolko is about TR's collusion with J.P. Morgan to create a regulatory system for natural monopolies. May not sound exciting on the surface, but it's a page-turner.

Also great: C. Vann Woodward's Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel (about one of the leaders of the Populist Movement in the 1890s), Lawrence Goodwyn's The Populist Moment (a larger view of the same era), Samuel P. Hays's The Response to Industrialism (a bit drier but still interesting), and Robert Wiebe's In Search of Order 1877-1920 is a generally-regarded definitive classic in history circles.

I'll second the recommendation of The Alienist. Since Caleb Carr is also an historian (Alienist was his first novel), it's steeped in the history of the time. Every time I read it, I expect to see a Jacob Riis photograph accompanying some of the passages.

I'll second the recommendation of The Alienist. Since Caleb Carr is also an historian (Alienist was his first novel), it's steeped in the history of the time. Every time I read it, I expect to see a Jacob Riis photograph accompanying some of the passages.

Yes, you really get the NY-the-way-it-was vibe. Why hasn't this been made into a movie?

Why hasn't this been made into a movie?

From a 1999 Timeinterview with Carr:

Only "The Alienist" [has been attempted to be made into a movie] and the attempts have been so bad that I have not yet sold "Angel" [its sequel] to the movies. What happened was that a producer bought the rights and then decided he had to completely change the characters in the book. We got into a huge conflict, one that is actually ongoing.

And from a 1997 Salon interview:

Q: What's happening with the plan to make a movie of "The Alienist"? A: It's dead. It's been a classic tale of futility. Q: What's the problem? Is it tough to bring a period movie to fruition? A: I don't know that they really understood what book they were buying in a certain sense. It's a period piece, yes, but that's not hard. Period pieces are coming out all the time now. It doesn't have to be that expensive, either. But it's an ensemble piece that doesn't happen to involve a love story. And that's where they're really tripping. They're trying to make it a star vehicle with a love story. Well, that's not the book they bought.

ETA: Upon looking at other articles, apparently the producer he's talking about is Scott Rudin.