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Title details for Londoners by Craig Taylor - Available

Londoners

The Days and Nights of London Now--As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

"A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . . Delightful. . . . In Taylor's patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators." — New York Times Book Review

Londoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities–a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforgettable stories told by the real people who make the city hum.

Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor has spent years traversing every corner of the city, getting to know the most interesting Londoners, including the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub doorperson, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard at Buckingham Palace, and a couple who fell in love at the Tower of London—and now live there. With candor and humor, this diverse cast—rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)—shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before.

Together, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London in all its breadth, from Notting Hill to Brixton, from Piccadilly Circus to Canary Wharf, from an airliner flying into London Heathrow Airport to Big Ben and Tower Bridge, and down to the deepest tunnels of the London Underground. Londoners is the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.

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    • Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.

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  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 31, 2011
      Playwright Taylor (A Million Tiny Plays About Britain) provides an ambitious, wide-ranging compilation of oral histories by the people who live, work, and, even quit the city, with a lively, unvarnished sense of the feelings the city inspires. In Studs Terkel fashion, Taylor tries to let the voices emerge with a distinctive timbre, revealing myriad backgrounds and motivations—an Iranian immigrant was smuggled in illegally by hiding in a lorry via Dover in 2007; a BBC woman recounts how she was hired to make the London Underground recordings (“Mind the gap” and so on); an accidental member of the Queen’s Household Cavalry initially signed up only because he wanted to learn to drive; an old-timer from North London named Smartie depicts how gritty the city used to be in the late 1970s and ’80s; some savvy market traders at New Spitalfields negotiate sales of fruits and vegetables in rhyming slang (“Tom Mix” means six); the ubiquitous taxi driver recounts taking the grueling Knowledge of London exam (“The Knowledge”) among dozens of others. Taylor groups his accounts under general headings about what people do, such as “Keeping the Peace” (e.g., police officer, barrister) or “Gleaning on the Margins” (skipper, angler). Readers will be happy to see the map of the 32 boroughs. Although the work embarks initially on a depressing remembrance by “Former Londoner” Simon Kushner (“I suddenly realized that if I stayed in London, I’d be in exactly the same place in 10 or 20 years”), Taylor builds to true heights of civic virtue, as in Lost Property clerk Graig Clark’s account of restoring lost objects to their owners, like umbrellas and a “slice of gateau.”

    • Library Journal

      June 1, 2013
      For this oral history of London, Taylor ("Return to Akenfield") interviewed hundreds of people from all walks of life--from city planners to manicurists to housewives and including those born and raised in London or the vicinity as well as immigrants who have made the city their home. Their stories run the gamut, some intriguing, others not so interesting, some humorous and others depressing. Most are accounts of everyday lives as well as the tellers' personal life histories. The stories are read by five narrators who effectively capture the accents and attitudes of their subjects. VERDICT Readers who enjoyed Studs Terkel's oral histories will enjoy this, as will those interested in the social culture of London. ["More than a collection of conversations, this book brings London to life as it is--ever changing, ever eternal, ever unforgettable. A delight!" read the review of the Ecco: HarperCollins hc, "LJ" 10/1/11.--Ed.]--Phillip Oliver, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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