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| Taxi!: A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver | 
| Author: Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $14.79
You Save: $10.21 (41%)
New (27) from $14.79
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 576908
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 080188554X
Dewey Decimal Number: 388.413214097471
EAN: 9780801885549
ASIN: 080188554X
Publication Date: March 22, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Minor shelf wear
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| Customer Reviews:
not cluttered with talk October 18, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Maybe because I am a slow reader, but i dislike books that are made fatter and fluidier with made-up conversations and dialogue. I appreciate a succint book like this one. This is well researched. The sources at the back of the book is impressive. The author chose a chronological order, and maybe for me it would have been more fun if the book was ordered into themes, but then you would have a different book. I found interesting the beginning of the book, about bridging the class divide, of how uptown people can approach and communicate with the working class people (the driver). In the chapter of the sixties and seventies, I didn't see any mention of how the 1973 recession affected cab drivers, or the near-meltdown of the city in its bankrupcy verge.
 A Great Way to Learn About Cabbies September 6, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Graham Hodges cares about cabbies and drivers past. It's easy to see -- while many writers only rely on economic studies or interviews with current cab drivers, Hodges plows through history and gives us the viewpoint of taxi drivers through the ages. He's able to paint a picture for readers of a New York hack's life.
One of the most enjoyable parts of this book is a photographed collection of taxi memorabilia published with the book, including taxi-themed post cards full of sexual innuendo and a picture of female cabbies filling in for their men during the war. He has a unique way of showing the place of the yellow cab in U.S. pop culture, making the book much more interesting than a "just the facts" history lesson.
 Exhaustive but pedantic July 21, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Graham Hodges's new book, "Taxi!", is as thorough a study of cabdrivers in New York over the past hundred years as I'm sure one will ever see. Tracing the beginnings of the taxi business, Hodges takes the reader through many phases of its development and one thing can be certain...today's cabbies face dilemmas not unlike their predecessors. One assumes, through a back cover photo, that the author was a cabbie at one time. No mention is made of this in the book. It would have been nice to have had him offer his own reflections. Yet he is wonderfully good at educating us as to how the taxi industry works.
The problem with "Taxi!" is that it's just flat. At slightly over 180 pages of narrative it feels like a very long book. The first chapters deal with wages, strikes and way too many examples of Hollywood's mirroring and mimicking of New York cabdrivers. There are good stories of women who hack as well as African-American contributions, but by the end of the first half I wanted to give up. Going more or less decade by decade, there is a good chapter about taxis in the fifties. Here Hodges shines as he offers some good anecdotes...especially by Hy Gardner. But after that, the book loses its appeal.
"Taxi!" could have been a better book if it had been more fluid. A study is great but it has to be appealing. Hodges has given a deep insight about a segment of the population which has taken its hits but has fought back and keeps going.
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