Books in Brief

Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York City Subway, by Jim Dwyer (Crown, 312 pp., $20)

New York’s subways are probably the dirtiest, most dangerous, and least efficient underground train system, yet it’s the one cities worldwide emulate. Subway Lives, by New York Newsday’s Jim Dwyer, is a discerning social survey of the city’s underground transit system, where you’re just as likely to see a rider reading the Irish Times or Akropolis as the Daily News;in which more than three million people a day commute to work; which accommodates America’s most concentrated melting pot. About which Dwyer observes: “Joyce Bresa only has to turn a corner to see the world. She lives in Astoria, one of the greatest of all New York neighborhoods. The cafés serve coffee thick and black, the way the Greeks like it. . . . Venerable Armenian ladies stoke their ovens for rich savories . . . Church signs are in at least four languages.” But the lives of the riders whom Dwyer describes are merely a cover for a perceptive history of the subway and the city that grew up above it. Here and there, Dwyer falls into platitudes, deriding Koch and Reagan for rejecting the liberal dogmas that have made such a ruin of New York. It’s clear he’s more perceptive in viewing the world beneath than the city above.

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Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York City Subway, by Jim Dwyer (Crown, 312 pp., $20)

New York’s subways are probably the dirtiest, most dangerous, and least efficient underground train system, yet it’s the one cities worldwide emulate. Subway Lives, by New York Newsday’s Jim Dwyer, is a discerning social survey of the city’s underground transit system, where you’re just as likely to see a rider reading the Irish Times or Akropolis as the Daily News;in which more than three million people a day commute to work; which accommodates America’s most concentrated melting pot. About which Dwyer observes: “Joyce Bresa only has to turn a corner to see the world. She lives in Astoria, one of the greatest of all New York neighborhoods. The cafés serve coffee thick and black, the way the Greeks like it. . . . Venerable Armenian ladies stoke their ovens for rich savories . . . Church signs are in at least four languages.” But the lives of the riders whom Dwyer describes are merely a cover for a perceptive history of the subway and the city that grew up above it. Here and there, Dwyer falls into platitudes, deriding Koch and Reagan for rejecting the liberal dogmas that have made such a ruin of New York. It’s clear he’s more perceptive in viewing the world beneath than the city above.