Downtown, My Manhatten, By Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill is one of my favorite non-fiction writers, books or articles.  I am a political person and a history buff in addition to mysteries. This book is a history of New York from Native American time to almost this minute.
     Hamill begins with his love of New York city and specifically Manhattan. and what it was like growing up there.  This excellent journalist includes all of the boroughs of this city. Starting where he  it begins at the shores where the ships brought in the first immigrants.
     He interjects this with official history of the people who went before him including who constructed the buildings. He includes their history, architecture history, official history of what was going on in the country, the community.
     Then he expands from his beginnings in New York to New York's beginnings. He takes us on a walk as he narrates this walk with the story of both New York and his own family arriving in New York as an immigrant and the struggles they had in learning to live and love in this new home.
      He tells of the church where George Washington worshiped when New York was the temporary capitol of an emerging country. Hamill talks of war and peace; robber barons and the struggle and strength of the early settlers in his beloved city. He recalls his own seven decades of walks in those streets of the people he met and still meets and gives an exciting commentary of buildings long destroyed to make room for more buildings that he describes with equal love and wonder.
       The writer leaves you gasping for breath at the greatness and wonder of this one city New York  at the same time wanting to visit, to absorb it as he has. And to learn and study more about all the different people who lived here then and now. He provides almost the taste of the food they ate and created. The boroughs, where they are, why and how they changed.  He tells tales of folks from different countries and places to the music they wrote, listened to and played. Hamill describes for you the reasons they arrived  here with nothing but hope; the struggle, the will to survive here. The need to provide for their families and the toll it took on them balanced against the freedom they obtained.
      You are wrapped in a cocoon of love about this city, our country and the sense of place that we must have of our own home town, wherever it is that is still inside us. Love and wonder of how whole country. It sometimes makes you ashamed to whine and cry when things go bad or wrong in this county. Sort of "don't cry for yourself" America, just work harder, smarter to make this country better.
      This book makes US history come alive in the true sense of culture and struggles to survive. If you read or saw "Gangs of New York", this is the back ground, the companion book for them and every history text you have ever read.