Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

Luc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets--scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape.
Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era's opportunities for vice and entertainment--theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn't work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city's tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was.
Low Life provides an arresting and entertaining view of what New York was actually like in its salad days. But it's more than simpy a book about New York. It's one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written--an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York's past but about the present and future of all cities.

Sante, Lucy

Travel

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A trip through Paris as it will never be again--dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemian
Paris, the City of Lights, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the willfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris, Luc Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, which has nearly vanished but whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, in the culture of France itself, and, by extension, throughout the world.
Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses, Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of his narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted pre-Haussmann streets, through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians, through the whorehouses and dance halls and hobo shelters of the old city.
A lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, and of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bons vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the work and lives of those expunged from its center by the forces of profit.

The Other Paris

History

Europe

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

Parenting & Relationships

Penguin Press

The acclaimed author of Low Life reinvents the memoir in a cunning, lyrical book that is at once a personal history and a meditation on the construction of identity. Born in Belgium but raised in New Jersey, Luc Sante transformed himself from a pious, timid Belgian boy into a loutish American adolescent, who eschewed French while fantasizing about the pop star Françoise Hardy. To show how this transformation came about--and why it remained incomplete--The Factory of Facts combines family anecdote and ancestral legend; detailed forays into Belgian history, language, and religion; and deft synopses of the American character.

The Factory of Facts: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City

Without the nineteen upstate reservoirs that supply its water, New York City as we know it would not exist today.&nbsp; From&nbsp;1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. This feat of engineering served to meet New York City's ever-increasing need for water, sustaining its inhabitants and cementing it as a center of industry. West of the Hudson, it meant that twenty-six villages, with their farms, forest lands, orchards, and quarries, were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished, and submerged, profoundly altering ecosystems in ways we will never fully appreciate. This paradox of victory and loss is at the heart of Nineteen Reservoirs, Lucy Sante's meticulous account of how New York City secured its seemingly limitless fresh water supply, and why it cannot be taken for granted. In inimitable form, Sante plumbs the historical record to surface forgotten archives and images, bringing lost places back to life on the page. Her immaculately calibrated sensitivity honors both perspectives on New York City's reservoir system and helps us understand the full import of its creation. An essential history of the New York City region that will reverberate far beyond it, Nineteen Reservoirs examines universal divisions in our resources and priorities--between urban and rural, rich and poor, human needs and animal habitats. This is an unmissable account of triumph, tragedy, and unintended consequences. With 29 present-day photographs by Tim Davis

Americas

The Experiment

A new collection of essays from this acclaimed critic on photographers, musicians, artists, and writers (from Patti Smith to Weegee to David Wojnarowicz). Most of the pieces have a strong autobiographical element and sense of place, the Lower East Side of New York City where the author came of age in the fertile 1970s/80s. He traces his engagement with music and photography, his experience of the city, and his development as an artist and observer, in a series of articles that range from memoir to essay, fiction to critical analysis, humour to poetry.

Maybe the People Would Be the Times

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Verse Chorus Press

A revised and expanded new edition of Lucy Sante's classic history of the real-photo postcard, with 130 images and a new afterword.\nIn rural America at the beginning of the twentieth century, the worldwide postcard craze coincided with the spread of light, cheap photographic equipment. The result was the real-photo postcard, so-called because the cards were printed in darkrooms rather than on litho presses, usually in editions of a hundred or fewer, the work of amateurs and professionals alike. 
They were not intended for tourists, but as a medium of communication for the residents of small towns, isolated on the plains and in the hills. The cards document everything about their time and place, from intimate matters to events that qualified as news. They show people from every walk of life and the whole panorama of human activity: eating, sleeping, labor, worship, animal husbandry, amateur theatrics, barn-raising, spirit-rapping, dissolution, riot, disaster, death. Uncountable millions of them were made in the peak years, 1905 to 1912. 
The 123 postcards reproduced in this book cover the vast range of subjects encompassed by the medium-sometimes lyrical, sometimes bracingly harsh-and Lucy Sante's penetrating analysis places them in their full historical and artistic context. She argues that the cards were a medium of expression very much like the folk music being made in the same places at the same time-open to the complete and unvarnished experience of life and enacting tradition even as they embody modernity. They also represent a crucial stage in the evolution of photography-they are the essential link between the plain style of the Civil War photographers and the vision of the great midcentury documentarians, above all Walker Evans. 
Combining her gifts as a chronicler of early twentieth-century America, a historian of photography, and a peerless critic, Sante shows how the "vast, teeming, borderless body of work" constituted by these postcards adds up to a "self-portrait of the American nation."

Folk Photography

Visible Spectrum

Before becoming the critically acclaimed filmmaker responsible for such iconic films as Dr. Strangelove and The Shining, Stanley Kubrick spent five years as a photographer for Look magazine. The Bronx native joined the staff in 1945, when he was only 17 years old, and shot humanist slice-of-life features that celebrate and expose New York City and its inhabitants.Through a Different Lens reveals the keen and evocative vision of a burgeoning creative genius in a range of feature stories and images, from everyday folk at the laundromat to a day in the life of a debutant, from a trip to the circus to Columbia University. It features around 300 images, many previously unseen, as well as rare Look magazine tear sheets and an introduction by noted photography critic Lucy Sante.These still photographs attest to Kubrick's innate talent for compelling storytelling, and serve as clear indicators of how this genius would soon transition to making some of the greatest movies of all time.

Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs

Taschen America, LLC

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sante, Lucy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sante, Lucy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sante, Lucy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

The Other Paris

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

The Factory of Facts: A Memoir

Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City

Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City

Maybe the People Would Be the Times

Folk Photography

Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs