Scope and Contents New York's undersung borough of Queens, home to the new Ellis Island (the city's airports), may be the most diverse county in the country today, and documentarians Lehrer and Sloan have innovatively brought it to life. First-person narratives that sometimes intertwine several voices (some were broadcast on the public radio program The Next Big Thing) are matched by a bold and colorful layout: large portraits, long-view landscapes, multiple typefaces (sometimes within the same paragraph) and inset graphics or asides. The stories are grouped in five lower-case sections: contemporary pilgrims," "asylum seekers," "family ties," "neighborhood tales" and "unlikely coexistences" (Ping-Pong players, a high school, a punk-gypsy cabaret band). The language can be poetic; a Congolese asylum-seeker declares, "Wackenhut is a for-profit business they are making from the sorrow of detainees." Two Egyptian restaurateurs, brothers, lament gentrification: "You really killed yourself with the...

Scope and Contents

Near the title page, special thanks are printed mentioning Ruth and Marvin Sackner and others for their support of this book. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.