Westchester

By Alex Shoumatoff

Book Overview

Vintage Books

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679733272
• ISBN13: 9780679733270
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 219 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

History, cultural geography, and much more

This wonderful book is a combination of great things. Shoumatoff is a sympathetic listener and a careful reporter. Westchester County, N.Y. contains densely developed towns and commercial nodes, run-of-the-mill suburbs, gorgeous wooded areas, and lots of history. It's a detailed account, part trenchant anecdote, part careful research. For example, Westchester has more trees now than it did two hundred years ago. (Grazing animals, mainly horses, kept the woods back, then.) Shoumatoff has talked to folks, read histories, and lived there. Unlike other geographies of comparatively small places, this one is never precious or merely detail-obsessed. Rather, it's really, really good, a terrific and humane example of the genre.