Books about Brooklyn
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During my lifetime, the word "outing" has mutated beyond recognition. It first entered my youthful vocabulary (as did so many other words) through the medium of baseball. An "outing" — in the old days –meant to me only a stint on the mound. "Podres has had a good "outing" today." The more general meaning of…
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Autobiographers from Brooklyn divide, on the whole, into two camps. There are the discontented, who yearned from day one to get the hell out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible; and then there are the nostalgics, perpetually romanticizing those great days of spaldeens, stickball, and chocolate egg creams. Martin Levinson's privately-published memoir Brooklyn Boomer,…
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In the late 40s and 50s, Marty Glickman was the radio voice of the New York Knicks. As a basketball announcer, he was simply the best. Most of us from that era, especially Brooklyn guys, can still recall in our mind's ear his melodious, accurate and rapid-fire recreation of the game. "Gallatin to Braun on…
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I met Barry Menikoff a couple of times. The first time was at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and the second time when he was a visiting professor here in Boulder. A Robert Louis Stevenson specialist, he was; I've had a fondness for RLS from my childhood, and I've read a substantial percentage…
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The singer and composer Barry Manilow writes that he took three arduous years to produce his rather thin memoir (Sweet Life, Adventures on the Way to Paradise, 1987). I'm skeptical of his claim because his book has all the outward indications of the celebrity genre that might justly be called the "as-told-to's. It's written as…
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Half of Pete Hamill's memoir sometimes seems to have dropped down from another universe or more precisely from an alternative civilization, while the other half depicts events and ideas that are as familiar to me (as they say) as the back of my hand. Although Pete and I are both Brooklynites and near-contemporaries (he was…
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I must confess that I had never heard of architect-entrepreneur Robert Stern until I read Martin Filler's NYRB review of Stern's recent autobiography — which is called Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture. How could I have been so behindhand, so ill-informed? Filler's evaluation of the memoir is sharp-elbowed. He plainly doesn't like…
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This year's list is incomplete. During the Vermont summer, I neglected to keep good records. My porous brain can't bring to mind all I read in June, July, August, and September. In addition, it's a list of books only, so no periodicals (New Yorker, New York Review of Books), Northern Forests) or newspapers. Abdulrazak Gurnah,…
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From my birth in 1939 until I fled to Ithaca in 1956, I lived on East 9th Street, in a section of Brooklyn that had no other name than "Flatbush." But all is flux, as Heraclitus said in a very different context, and now the undistinguished neighborhood of my youth has been upgraded to pretentious…
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I read Imagining Robert, My Brother, Madness, and Survival by Jay Neugeboren for neighborhood and neighborly reasons. Its author is a 1955 graduate of fabled Erasmus Hall High School (I was class of 1956). Much of the story takes place in the area of Brooklyn now called Lefferts Gardens. Walkable, or at least bicyclable, from…