2007 Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, Princeton University Industrial Relations Section Naturally identified with the Big Apple, New York City cabdrivers hold a special place in the American folk culture writ large. Cabbies proverbially counsel, console, and confound, all the while flitting through the snarling traffic and bustling masses of the nation's largest city. Variously seen as the key to street-level opinion, a source of reliable information, or mysterious savants who don't speak much English, the hacks who move New Yorkers have been integral to the city’s growth and culture since the mid-nineteenth century when they first began shuttling residents, workers, and visitors in horse-drawn carriages. Their importance grew with the introduction of gasoline-powered cars early last century and continues to the present day, when more than 12,000 licensed yellow cabs operate in Manhattan alone. Taxi! is the first book-length history of New York City cabdrivers and the community they compose. From labor unrest and racial strife to ruthless competition and political machinations, this deftly woven narrative captures the people―lower-class immigrants for the most part―and their hardscrabble struggle to capture a piece of the American dream. Hodges tells the tale through contemporary news accounts, Hollywood films, social science research, and the words of the cabbies themselves. Whether or not you’ve ever hailed a cab on Broadway, Taxi! provides a fascinating new perspective on New York’s most colorful emissaries. "Hodges' story will be a pleasure for both scholarly and general interest readers. Highly recommended." ( Library Journal ) " Taxi! is not only lively and erudite social history, it is probably the best account of taximen that is ever to be written... The cabby is fortunate, however, to have found his sociological poet laureate in Graham Hodges. In the taxi trade, we would have called this fascinating trip in his gregarious company, 'a great fare.'" ( Wall Street Journal ) "In this informative, solid history, Graham Russell Gao Hodges traces the story of the cab drivers from 1907, when the first metered taxis appeared on New York streets, to the present." (Pete Hamill New York Times Book Review ) "The definitive book on New York cabs." ( USA Today ) "Hodges draws from driver memoirs, taxi publications, and the drivers' image as seen in the movies and on television. This is an interesting, readable study of the role of the taxis in New York's history, especially the struggles the drivers face." ( Choice ) "Hodges has written a marvelous, deeply empathetic, and richly detailed account of a profession so indelibly inscribed in the daily experience and mythology of urban life as to be all but invisible to us. At once frantically hailed and frequently abused, taxi drivers epitomize―in ways most of us grasp but routinely ignore―the vivid human flux that is the lifeblood of city life. Thanks to the mercurial culture, shifting demographics, and glancingly contingent nature of the experience on both sides of the glass―at once endlessly repeated and never twice the same―cab drivers must rank among the least well-represented professionals in the hierarchy of urban life. Hodges has set out to remedy that, and has done so admirably." (Ric Burns, director of the Emmy Award–winning series New York: A Documentary Film ) "You have to live in New York to know how critical taxis are to circulation in the great metropolis. But you do not have to live in New York to be fascinated by this unusual book, which gives a powerful human dimension to one of Gotham's most important subcultures." (Kenneth T. Jackson, editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City ) "Grab this cab! Its historian driver will take you on a fascinating spin around town, recalling a host of dramatic events, and introducing an amazing array of cabbies past and present (including the astonishing number of movie stars who played taxi driver on the big screen). Your perspective on cab rides―and New York City―will never be the same again." (Mike Wallace, coauthor of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 ) Graham Russell Gao Hodges , a former New York City cabdriver, is the Distinguished Fulbright Professor of History at Peking University and the George Dorland Langdon, Jr. Professor of History at Colgate University. Used Book in Good Condition