|
|
Product Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST
An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster―and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today
When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue.
In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York―and reshaped ideas about government across America.
At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.
Fear City is one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2017, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics
- Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Jacobin)
- Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal
- Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
- Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
- Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
- From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
- The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit - Updated Edition (Princeton Classics)
- A Brief History of Neoliberalism
- 1919
*If this is not the "Fear City" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link
.
Details were last updated on Dec 25, 2024 23:32 +08.
