New York with July | The echoes

About the. From A (like “acronyms”, a local passion) to Z (like “zoo”, that of the Bronx), this new “love dictionary” tells, in nearly 250 entries, the city of all excesses and all opposites : fortune and misery, skyscrapers and slums, great history and anecdotes, literature and pop art, drugs and marathon …

The interest. “Everything was written about New York”, recognizes Serge July at the opening of his book. He chose to tell about a city that looks like him: a lot of politics, a few miscellaneous facts, a hint of economy, a lot of cultural and historical references. We learn a host of things, useful or trivial: that until 2016 a statue of Lenin brought back from the USSR was enthroned on a roof in the East Village, that Clémenceau was a correspondent in New York for the newspaper “Le Time ”(and wrote on the impeachment procedure), that the atomic bomb was born in a building on Broadway, next to warehouses storing up to 4,000 tons of uranium, which Woody Allen tried to buy back his film “Manhattan” to make it disappear, or that the nickname “Big Apple” has several possible origins …

The author. A former Maoist who became a journalist, then emblematic boss of the daily “Liberation” from 1974 to 2006, Serge July has increased his visits to New York since the early 1980s, “Usually once a year, for fifty different reasons”.

The quote.“I keep coming back to New York to get lost again. “

“Dictionary of New York lovers”, by Serge July, Plon, 750 pages, 27 euros.

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