 | More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times Subjects: City and town life -- New York (State) -- New York -- Anecdotes; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- Anecdotes; New York (N.Y.) -- Biography -- Anecdotes; New York (N.Y.) -- Social conditions -- Anecdotes; For 16 years, local news and quirky, personal stories found a home in the (now defunct) City section of the Sunday New York Times. Former section editor Rosenblum gathers 50 of the best pieces of the post-September 11 era by masters of the form including Edwidge Danticat and Francine Prose. Roy Hoffman's remembrance of a West Village buddy with cerebral palsy who was forced to confine his world to the few blocks he could navigate is complemented by Saki Knafo's tribute to a group of aging amateur athletes who've been playing basketball together for 33 years and David McAninch's appreciative travelogue of the "forgotten" cityscape of lunch counters, taverns, and cigar shops-all odes to a New York less romanticized and more real. Tragedies-like the story of giving a homeless man buried in the city's potter's field a proper family funeral-are squeezed like subway passengers between droller accounts of, say, the weekly lunch ritual of the New Yorker's wry cartoonists. Organized thematically into such categories as "Characters" and "Rituals, Rhythms and Ruminations," this rich sampling delivers. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Rosenblum Constance : Constance Rosenblum , most recently the author of the Habitats column published in the Real Estate section of The New York Times, was a longtime editor of the paper's City section and a former editor of the Times's Arts and Leisure section. She is the author of Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. |
