Join co-hosts Anne Moore and Chris Stacey for an innovative, exciting, and passionate approach to world literature. Our current city is New York City during "The Gilded Age." For our second meeting we discuss the classic non-fiction selection How The Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis.

First published in 1890, Jacob Riis’s remarkable study of the horrendous living conditions of the poor in New York City had an immediate and extraordinary impact on society, inspiring reforms that affected the lives of millions of people.

Date: Thursday, June 4, 2026

Time: 6:00PM Central

Location: Private room. Club on Michigan Avenue.

Event Cap at 10 People: Book Club is filled. Join the wait list by emailing Chris at [email protected].

Cost: Participants pay for their food and beverage.

Review

Today one of the last Bowery flophouses leans up against the futuristic steel facade of the New Museum, and a bed at the Bowery Hotel can run $750 a night. After such gentrification, it can be difficult to conjure up the squalid New York that Jacob Riis documented in his groundbreaking 1889 work of photojournalism, “How the Other Half Lives.” Riis was well aware that the “other half” in New York City had become the other three-quarters, with 1.2 million impoverished New Yorkers living in slums, 19th-century tenements that were a public health catastrophe, rife with typhus, diarrhea, cholera and tuberculosis. Employing unsentimental storytelling, reportage, social statistics and the latest advances in flash photography, Riis shed a stark light on the horrific living conditions of New York’s vast population of poor immigrants. - Matthew Power, New York Times

Photo Credit: Penguin Random House Promotional Material, Public Domain