Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto

Taking Manhattan:

The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

By Russell Shorto

WW Norton 2025

Readers who loved Russell Shorto’s 2004 work of popular history, The Island at the Center of the World, will naturally want a sequel in equal measure to dreading a sequel. What are the chances, they might rightfully ask, that the same author could write on the same subject in the same way with the same winning combination of solid research and intense readability? The Island at the Center of the World was inviting history just exactly as it should be written, a bestselling title and a perennial hit with book clubs, telling the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland with plenty of energy but no dumbed-down narrative gimmicks. It left open the natural possibility of a sequel that carries the story forward and gives readers the birth of Manhattan, and that’s the subject of Shorto’s new book, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.

And it works just as well as its beloved predecessor. The story seldom strays far from the tense biographical parallel at the heart of Manhattan’s birth between Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Netherland, and Richard Nicholls, the colonial problem-solver who was originally sent out from London with the aim of “bringing the Massachusetts Bay Colony to heel” and ended up becoming the first governor of the new entity called New York. There’s an appealingly broad cast of characters, but the infighting, the politicking, the deceit and weirdly misplaced valor all tend to shuttle between the personalities of these two men, and Shorto narrates it all in equal parts well-placed color commentary and periodic pauses for breath. “This book is about how New York came into being,” goes one such moment. “There were two European nations involved in its birth – parents, as I have suggested, who would each contribute genetic material to the newborn.”

And along the way to the birth of New York, Shorto excels at intensely-concentrated asides that serve wonderfully to propel the story forward. That story is born of the ongoing national aggressions between England and the Dutch, for instance, which can evoke quick, vivid asides like this one about the Four Days’ Battle in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, which was often hymned as the epitome of naval engagement in the age:

In fact, it was an appalling contest, with nearly two hundred ships arrayed in the North Sea in ‘line of battle’ formation, essentially two miles-long columns of vessels traveling in opposite directions, separated by a few yards of blood-dyed water, blasting relentlessly into one another … Hundreds of men burned alive as their ships, towers of wood with sailcloth, went up in gigantic plumes of flame and black smoke.

There are action vignettes like that, personality profiles that evolve across the fast-paced narrative, and deftly-placed bits of droll humor (Nicolls ended up naming this new place after the Duke of York, Shorto writes; “No one had instructed [him] on what to call it, so he decided himself”), all of it working just as fluidly as the whole mechanism did in The Island at the Center of the World. If Shorto opts to follow New York’s story a further few decades, that mechanism will serve us all well.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News