I lived in London for a few months after college, and since then it has always held a nostalgic place in my heart. Now Craig Taylor's new book, Londoners, allows me to revisit my younger days when I spent hours walking the streets of every neighborhood in Zone 1, touring the countless free museums and saving my pounds for West End performances (Man, was I ever a 22 year old stereotype, but it was magical!). An acclaimed journalist, Taylor has spent years traversing every corner of the city, getting the most interesting Londoners to talk about their lives and their city with candor and humor. The result is a vibrant, narrative portrait of London rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant, male and female.
Perhaps Sarah Lyall at the New York Times also has great memories of this wonderful city because her NYT Book Review (March 4) is chock-a-block full of praise:
“[A] rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place…though countless excellent books have been written on the city, this is the one that best captures what it’s like to live in London right now, through the words of the people themselves–just as Studs Terkel did for Chicago in his oral histories years ago…the material [Taylor] elicits proves his skill not only in asking questions that find the eloquence even in the naturally taciturn, but also in knowing the value of keeping offstage. Londoners is a master class in self-effacing journalism. In an age of celebrity interviews and bombastic, self-loving television hosts, Taylor is the rare specimen who appears genuinely to believe that other people’s words are more interesting than his own…Oral histories are only as good as the people in them, and this is as good an array as you could hope for… In Taylor’s patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators.”
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Be sure to read the whole review and pick up the book if you can….Also, while we are sharing, do you have any London stories? I want to hear!
– Annie