The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York (Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries)
"[This book] introduces us to a wide variety of guides to that city and positively celebrates the diversity, the idiosyncrasy, the subversiveness even the fictive nature of the stories they impose on the urban landscape... It's a fine piece of ethnography, very warm, very human, very interesting." -Laurie Taylor,BBC Radio"Explores the mysterious world of these urban explorers... on a plethora of cultural, historical, maritime, culinary and educational tours conducted mostly for tourists, but also frequented by curious New Yorkers" -Sam Roberts,The New York Times"With lively analysis punctuated by illustrative field notes from Wynn's own experiences on walking tours [The Tour Guide] has a suitably peripatetic structure, which takes the reader on a tour of its own." -Natalie Alvarez, American Ethnologist"The Tour Guide is an enormously interesting book. Wynn's extensive interviews and observations show us a variety of people giving tours of New York in a variety of ways, and by the time you finish the book you've learned a great deal about them, how they work, and why they do it. While The Tour Guide intersects with other classic books on urban life, Wynn's major accomplishment here is to provide a unique way of looking at cities you would never have arrived at just by thinking about them yourself." (Howard S. Becker, author of Outsiders)"