Gone to New York: Adventures in the City

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Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 917.4710443 Format: Bargain Price Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 224 Publication Date: 2005-11-03 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Release Date: 2005-10-13 Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Reviews: Welcome to Ian Frazier's New York, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who scaled the World Trade Center. Learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey. Like his literary forebears Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, Frazier makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Bag-Snagging in the City Comment: The New York in Woody Allen's movies is beautiful but unreal, like a movie star who's never as stunning in real life as on screen. Ian Frazier's New York, on the other hand, is violent and dirty, but real. These essays are arranged chronologically, from 1975 to 2005. (Oddly, there are no entries from the eighties.) Frazier writes about neighborhoods and bars and shops and characters. There are floods and robberies and murders. One of my favorite pieces is about a typewriter repair shop that Frazier finds when he needs his manual typewriter repaired. The owner, Mr. Tytell was one of the few typewriter repairmen left as word processors and then computers replaced typewriters. The article was written in 1997 and the 83 year-old owner had just renewed the lease on his shop for another ten years. Since ten years has passed, I was curious if the shop was still in business. A quick search revealed that the shop went out of business in 2001, but the family still has a successful document research service, doing forensic investigations of typewritten papers. No word on whether Frazier still uses a typewriter to write his essays. There are three pieces about Frazier's obsession with removing plastic bags from trees. This apparently is not a specifically New York obsession since he mentions trips to Los Angeles and Massachusetts and Illinois to remove bags from trees. When he first wrote about bags in trees, it didn't seem completely odd to me that he might remove bags in his own neighborhood. You want your neighborhood to look nice, don't you? But it became more of a sport for him and his buddies. They snagged bags instead of golfing. I suppose the fact that I read three pieces about bag snagging is testimony to Frazier's writing. I sure wouldn't have read three articles about golfing. And it's a lesson for the young writers out there -- if you can't find a quirky character to write about, become one. Customer Rating: Summary: GONZO JOURNALISM LIVES! Comment: Hunter Thompson may be gone, but personal journalism is alive and well as evidenced by this superlative collection of quirky,elegant pieces subtitled, "Adventures in the City". If Ian Frazier's book were a mystery, #1 would probably have posted a five-star review the day after it was published in November 2005. Since GONE TO NEW YORK is only a collection of casual essays, it has waited four months for its first customer review. Essays get no respect from Amazon customers -- or from Amazon either, for that matter. Amazon's entry for the book lists Jamaica Kincaid (who wrote the introduction) as the author, rather than Frazier. Frazier, a displaced Ohioan, makes the reader see New York through his eyes: focusing on peculiar and interesting details that go unnoticed by visitor and native alike. The longest is a 35 page profile of Canal Street (where he lived during its gritty years) and its denizens. In the aftermath of 9-11 he interviews George Willig, who earned brief celebrity-hood in 1977 by climbing one of the twin towers. Frazier reports on the vintage graffiti on desks in the stacks of Butler Library. He writes twice about "Bags in Trees". In the first he simply describes the diversity of plastic bags and other items that adorn trees in Brooklyn. A decade latter he tells how he and a friend became obsessed with removing the arboreal litter and end up inventing and patenting an extension tool for removing it. My favorite in the collection is "Typewriter Man" about Martin Tytell, who still sevices manual typewriters. More Reviews