Book Review: Gone To New York

"Frazier's Manhattan is not chic and sophisticated. He gravitates instead to the gritty. He lived within sight of the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, an unromantic neighborhood if ever there was one, especially in the 1970s when Frazier became a resident.

...One moment he offers a worldweary New Yorker's humor with observations like his notion that rents in his old neighborhood "are probably about the same as they were in Carthage, or Nineveh, or Peking under the Tangs." A paragraph later he charms with a description of a scene in Chinatown, complete with small, bright birds in wooden cages who call out to sparrows on a fire escape even as two men unroll an illuminated Chinese scroll."