City Lights: Stories about New York

Dan Barry writes about New York as if it was a village. Its size is not as important as the individuals who live there, the people who inhabit it, make it the alive, vibrant and wonderfully alluring city it is. This is not about New York, the city. It is about the flesh and blood of the city, about the people and characters of the city, and it's hard to imagine a city anywhere that has more characters and color to write about than New York City. Dan Barry does a good job of capturing their individuality, their uniquenss and their inevitable ties and bonds to the city. Obviously, this review is written by an unabashed lover of NYC...and from Alabama, too.

Whenever I read the NY Times over the past few years and became despairing of the state of the world and humanity, I always knew I could turn to Dan Barry to "pull me up." Barry's collection of columns are really prose poems, filled with soul and spirit of the Hidden New York City: cello playing bus drivers, workin' stiffs, everyday Janes and Joes, whose lives Barry illuminates with a style that is a pleasure to read again and again. These columns were my daily vitamins. Rereading them in this collection is truly a revelation that the spirit of the common people is what gives NY and America its uncommon soul. Buy this book. Then buy another and give it to a friend. Read it and feel renewed. It will "pull you up" too.

It's the Sunday before Christmas. First thing this morning, pre-coffee, pre-bowel movement/ablutions, pre-church, I went into the front yard to retrieve my copy of the New York Times. I knew the pages would be filled with column after column of depressing dispatches from Darfur, Wichita, Whereveristan, mass homicide, sub-prime scandal, suicide bombing, official doublespeak about why torture is a crime except when practiced by CIA/Blackwater, the inexhaustible ineptitude/fathomless arrogance of the Bush administration, and opposing platitudes/feckless fulminations by Frank Rich. God's mercy on us all. I didn't rescue the Times from pelting rain and soot-ridden snow, however, in order to batter my wounded/aged soul with the alarming/ deteriorating condition/direction of our country/world. My intent was to turn immediately to Dan Barry's latest report from the homeland/ hinterland and to see what redeeming/enlightening observations had come from the pen/laptop/PC of the single-most powerful, poetic, sublime columnist at work at this moment in these Disunited/Dispirited States. (And, caveat lector, Dan Barry is not to be confused with satirist Dave Barry.) I wasn't disappointed by what I read. One again, I was amazed. (I almost wrote "astounded," except that the end piece in the NYT Book Review of several months ago by Joe Quinlan--a satirist every bit as good as Dave Barry and a lot more savage--has rendered that word verboten by anyone attempting a review.) Here in the face of yet another merciless deadline, Dan Barry had managed to pinpoint a revealing angle on a familiar story (check it out for yourself, "A Place Just like Every Other Place. Only Not," 12/23/07) and produce a precisely chiseled, exquisitely faceted journalistic gem of finely cut reporting and lyrically evocative writing. My original introduction to Dan Barry's writing was in his "About New York" columns, a selection of which is reproduced in his newest book, CITY LIGHTS. Barry's predecessors in this spot included the newspaper equivalent of Gerhig/Ruth or Mantle/Maris (Yankee fans, take your pick)--the inimitable Meyer Berger and the nonpareil Francis X. Clines. Barry has not only matched their achievement but set a whole new standard, producing column after column that exposes/celebrates/ investigates/ mourns/explores the incessant/inexhaustible tragedy/comedy/ soap opera/ burlesque/masque that unfolds in New York each and every day. I'm sure that I read every single column in CITY LIGHTS when it first appeared in the Times. But as I read and re-read this book, I'm astounded (sorry, Joe Quinlan) anew by how utterly fresh/invariably perceptive/carefully observed each and every article is. Years from now, this book will be taught in journalism schools (if such institutions still exist) and devoured by historians (if such a profession still exists) interested in what life was really like in New York during the first decade of the 21st century. Those wh