The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.59 (982 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0062277197 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-09-03 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases.Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth. He investigates the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library and the Empire State Building.A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, suffused with a mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism, and wit, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.. Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger Rosenblatt imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals
Beautifully written! The book is filled with so much MDF Beautifully written! The book is filled with so much wisdom and wit! He is a favorite author of mine! And I love New York!. "But how do you walk in the world?" according to Anjelica Whitehorne. The Boy Detective is a unique read: part detective story, part memoir, part walk, the book, called a memoir for lack of a better term, is not only a walk through Rosenblatt's personal history but also through the history of literature and the history of Manhattan. Rosenblatt walks with his past through Manhattan, seeing himself as a boy detective, and as an adult write. “If you do not want to be around people who talk their brains out, why live in New York?” Mary Whipple In his memoir of his childhood in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of New York City (18th – 22nd Streets between Park Ave. South and 3rd Ave.), award-winning journalist/essayist Roger Rosenblatt uses the conceit of man’s having separate souls – one for the senses and one for the intellect – as the basis of a memoir about growing up in New York Cit
Rosenblatt shares poignant memories of the landscape of his childhood: the New York Public Library, Gramercy Park, Union Square, Madison Square Garden, and long-gone tenements and movie theaters. Snatches of conversations with students are interspersed with remembrances of growing up as Rosenblatt recalls longing for but knowing he lacked what he admired in great literary detectives, “Holmes’s powers of observation, Hercule Poirot’s powers of deduction, Sam Spade’s straight talk, Miss Marple’s stick-to-itiveness, and Philip Marlowe’s courage and sense of honor.” The amateur sleuth searched for intriguing clues to a hardware store break-in but had no interest in solving the mystery of a teacher’s suicide
Roger Rosenblatt is the author of six off-Broadway plays and eighteen books, including Lapham Rising, Making Toast, Kayak Morning and The Boy Detective. He is the recipient of the 2015 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.