Rating: 
Summary: One of the best books of 2003
Review: ...and definitely my favorite book about New York. Although it is non-fiction, "Colossus" is as vibrant and impressionistic as Whitehead's novels. Whitehead's prose style perfectly captures the buzz and hustle of the city; it's spare, bitter, and funny. The short, even choppy text changes perspective from sentence to sentence: in a chapter on subways, for example, you're in one passenger's head, then another, then another. The effect gives the same sensation as New York itself: a swarm of individuals making up the hive. Everything Whitehead has to say about his city is apt: New York regulars and occasional visitors will find the shock of recognition on every page. My own favorite, about a subway car full of strangers: "If you don't know what time it is, wait for a peek while he changes his grip." If you have not tried that yourself, you should spend more time in NYC.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books of 2003
Review: ...and definitely my favorite book about New York. Although it is non-fiction, "Colossus" is as vibrant and impressionistic as Whitehead's novels. Whitehead's prose style perfectly captures the buzz and hustle of the city; it's spare, bitter, and funny. The short, even choppy text changes perspective from sentence to sentence: in a chapter on subways, for example, you're in one passenger's head, then another, then another. The effect gives the same sensation as New York itself: a swarm of individuals making up the hive. Everything Whitehead has to say about his city is apt: New York regulars and occasional visitors will find the shock of recognition on every page. My own favorite, about a subway car full of strangers: "If you don't know what time it is, wait for a peek while he changes his grip." If you have not tried that yourself, you should spend more time in NYC.
Rating: 
Summary: Over-hyped and negative
Review: As I am reading this book, I'm going "huh?" and "what does that mean?" and "this is like poetry, apparently..." I can't say I liked the writing style (such as it is), but it did create word pictures and pulses inside me despite my desire not to like the book! It is a mood piece, at least to me. Not a writer I would buy again though. Sorry!
Rating:
Summary: What have we here?
Review: As I am reading this book, I'm going "huh?" and "what does that mean?" and "this is like poetry, apparently..." I can't say I liked the writing style (such as it is), but it did create word pictures and pulses inside me despite my desire not to like the book! It is a mood piece, at least to me. Not a writer I would buy again though. Sorry!
Rating: 
Summary: See Spot Run
Review: Colson Whitehead clearly hopes that readers will think of him as being the colossus of New York, but those with greater discernment will recognize his work as a highly obnoxious children's book about visiting the big city. Turn to any page and find observations as stunning as this random selection about the subway:"Out of the tunnel and suddenly elevated. Second-floor city. Looking into apartments, browsing lives and what people throw up on their walls." I rest my case. Save your money and wait for it to be remaindered if you must satisfy. Your curiosity. If you must. Buy it. At all. See spot run.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh, this could have been so good...
Review: Colson Whitehead is a talented writer, as one can easily see in his first two novels. So when I read that he was writing nonfiction about New York, I was thrilled at the prospects. But I don't know what to make of this book.
The majority of the 13 parts have the same structure. Take a place. Write short sentences that explain what you would see at that place. Include actions and thoughts of those characters.
On paper, it sounds awful, and it some ways it is. It is the shortest 176 pages you will ever read, but this style gets highly repetitive. Rather than explaining why he chose these places or what they mean to him, Whitehead includes little about himself. There is quite simply zero insight into the soul of the city.
But the book does have its strong points. Whitehead's scenes are very evocative and I often found myself smiling and nodding at his dead-on descriptions of what I had seen in New York. He notices things about New York that you take for granted. At times, his skills shine through.
But it ultimately felt like reading a good writer's notes before he turns them in to an actual book. I wanted so much more from this book, and based on what is there (and also the wonderful first essay, which is different from all others in structure), I get the feeling it could be there. Everyone has their own version of New York and I'm still waiting to see how Whitehead really sees his hometown. Ultimately it reads like an astute but repetitive poem. Nonetheless, any book that makes me nostalgic about my trips to Port Authority has done one incredible job.
Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic.
Review: Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts (Doubleday, 2003) When one encounters the name "Colson Whitehead," one is apt to think of an old Irish immigrant viewing the city through a jaundiced eye, bleary from another night of stumbling home in rush hour only to find he's locked himself out of his bachelor pad and can't get to the can of beans sitting on the counter seductively calling his name. Instead, what we're given is a young (younger than I am, anyway) born-and-raised New Yorker writing about the place he calls home. But Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York is not just another travelogue. Oh, no, my friends. In fact, it is anything but; I seriously doubt the NY tourism board is going to be recommending this one. At times loving and ominous, sweet and sassy, laugh-out-loud funny and painfully depressed, The Colossus of New York is much like New York itself. There are eight million stories in the naked city, Whitehead wryly quotes, and one would think from reading this that every one of them is feeling a completely different emotion from any of the others at any given moment, and that it's all a constantly swirling chaotic mass. Amen. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is how Whitehead manages to take this odd, impressionist look at New York and map it onto you, the reader. You're liable to find at least one or two snatches of sentence per page you can identify with, even if you've never set foot within an hundred miles of the place. Thus, even if you care nothing about New York, it's probable he's going to keep you interested in its goings-on. A beautiful thing, that. But the draw of the book, and its continuing majesty throughout, is Whitehead's ability with language. His diction takes us from the language poetry of Charles Olson to the Nuyorican-style street rap that passes for poetry among slammers, but with Whitehead the language never loses its poetic drive. All of it, even the ugliness, is beautiful. And above all, The Colossus of New York is a love song, the kind that one would write to one's spouse after seventy years of marriage if one could find a way to include all one's spouse's faults and still make it beautiful. This is a powerful little book, and highly deserving of the widest possible audience. A shoo-in for the top ten list this year. **** ½
Rating:
Summary: Colossal!
Review: For anyone who has ever loved or hated (or, as is usually the case, both loved and hated) New York City. Whitehead brings a freshness of style to the genre of the essay, in the same way that Tom Wolfe did 30 years ago (although their writing styles are quite dissimilar). The Colossus of New York is a love poem to the City, but not in the first blush of romance. It is instead a love poem written to a lover of 20 years, whose endearing and maddening qualities are so intertwined that you cannot tell one from the other. This is a beautiful book by an author worth watching.
Rating:
Summary: An Ode to the City
Review: For anyone who has ever loved or hated (or, as is usually the case, both loved and hated) New York City. Whitehead brings a freshness of style to the genre of the essay, in the same way that Tom Wolfe did 30 years ago (although their writing styles are quite dissimilar). The Colossus of New York is a love poem to the City, but not in the first blush of romance. It is instead a love poem written to a lover of 20 years, whose endearing and maddening qualities are so intertwined that you cannot tell one from the other. This is a beautiful book by an author worth watching.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful little book.
Review: I read a great deal of this book in a bookstore this afternoon, knowing good and well that I had no business buying another book - I ended up buying it (half because I was in love with it, half because the author was doing a reading at the same bookstore later in the evening and I wanted a signed copy). Sufficed to say - I went to the reading, finished the book on the train and I am in love with this man's words and have fallen in love with New York AGAIN (both his and mine) The writing is so beautiful and raw and smart and witty and has the tendency to remind us how wondrous all of the things we overlook as ordinary really are and just how singular NY reallt is. And, of course, god bless the man who can write in tons of tenses and not lose the audience's interest. Whitehead feels to me (having not read his other work) like the rare kind of writer who can write to and for anyone. Everyone is getting this book for christmas. Everyone. I hope many read it, its give-you-goosebumps lovely.
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