The Mad Monks' Guide to New York City

Funny, irreverant and witty ....took me to places I never would have discovered . . . .what a mind expanding trip without drugs! BRAVO.

The Mad Monks' Guide to New York City avoids dwelling on well-worn landmarks such as the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, focusing more on the eccentric and offbeat, such as Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, Fly Fishing in Central and even Toxic Tourism like Staten Island's Fresh Kills Dump, the world's largest dump/landfill. Along with the sublime and the bizarre is a cornucopia of the great city's diverse culture, from bars and restaurants to entertainment spots, making it probably as useful for those who live in the city as for those planning to visit it.

The Mad Monks' Guide to New York City is definitely the best thing I've read on that place in years, maybe the best book on New York since Washington Irving.

Here I am, spitting and cussing and followed by my tribe of beautiful wife, giggling baby, manic dog, neurotic cat, tiny overpriced one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, thirty-two South Bronx homeroom students, anti-situationist buddies in the Yale Art History Graduate School, coffee shop aficionados, strange relatives, no money, one as yet unfinished great American novel, an entire collection of badly washed decaying old college clothes, and, last but not least, one pristine, mint, delectable copy of "The Mad Monks' Guide to New York City." Genius! Genius! Genius! But who are these morons who keep giving the Monks the cliched comparisons to Kerouac and Kuralt? Where are the comparisons to the greats? As convoluted, descriptive, and gratuitous as a Faulkner sentence! As minutely involved as Wolf! As sharp and evocative as Hemmingway! As full of life and extraterrestialy wise as Salinger! As innovatively plotted as Joyce! As romantic as Austin! As poetic and erotic as Shakespeare!

Although I think I'll have to buy another NYC travel book in order to get more detailed information about places to stay and to eat, I really enjoyed reading this. It's full of interviews with interesting New Yorkers, like Wigstock's Lady Bunny and the guy who runs the sideshows at Coney Island. There's a great section on NYC neighborhoods as well. The charming personality of the Mad Monks really comes through in their writing--you learn a lot about what they don't like (yuppies, sterile architecture, the Disneyfication of Times Square) as well as a few things about what they do (drag queens, egg creams, and Rudy Giuliani, strangely enough).