Lucy Sante

"A vivid investigation into the seamy underside of nineteenth and twentieth century Paris"-- "A trip through Paris as it will never be again--dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemian Paris, the City of Light. The city of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, of soft cheese and fresh baguettes. Or so tourist brochures would have you believe. In The Other Paris, Luc Sante reveals the city's hidden past, its seamy underside--one populated by...

Lucy Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets--scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape. Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different...

Provides a detailed picture of what life in the slums of New York was like, how the slums were created, how and why they remained as they were, who was forced to live there, and offers suggestions for easing the lot of the poor.

Set in 1919 but based on a real incident from 1906. A coal mine collapses on the frontier between Germany and France, trapping a team of French miners inside. Workers on both sides of the border spring into action, putting aside national prejudices and wartime grudges to launch a dangerous rescue operation.

A squad of homicide detectives roam through the seamier parts of New York City as they solve a murder case. Gives viewers an unvarnished look at life in the city using the technique of neorealism.