Work and Other Sins: Life in New York City and Thereabouts

LeDuff proudly declaims, `New York is a glamorous city, constituted mostly of nobodies', and on that score he is right. But, o, what nobodies there are! from people coping with the aftermath of 9/11 to the remains of what was once New York's thriving fishing and gaming industries, to the gay underworld, to assorted dives and bars around town, LeDuff paints unflinching portraits of real people. Yet, they are snapshots- not studied portraits. We get a wry smile, a man atop the Empire State Building, men who think they can get around the rules and regulations of the city, be it in Jamaica Bay, or in a strip club, or immigrants who will never make it in the new land, hopeful, perhaps, that their children will....We are left wanting more, as we so often are in life, and I know, and state here, that these slight but beautiful portraits will be transmogrified at some future dates in works of mine into fully realized characters. There seems to me, at least, an inner demand to do so. Such is the power of LeDuff's prose. Yet, there are limits on it. The best of the pieces clock in at 800-1200 words. Above that threshold LeDuff's magic genericizes, and he becomes just another reporter. Yet, below it, New York city thrums and vibrates as a creature in its own right. LeDuff has a reporter's eye, but a craftsman's touch. His prose is clipped and spare, at its best, and free from useless and excess moralizing. One need not moralize about manifestly poor lives being lived in squalid conditions. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the best portrait series is that about the 9/11 aftermath- especially one incident where a 9/11 widow is confronted by an angry radio show caller who thinks she and the other 9/11 families are basking too much in their stature, and asking for too much from the rest of us. Yes, there are certainly political aspects to the book, and LeDuff makes no bones that he sides with the All-American Common Man, or the `nobody' as he calls him, but there is no screeding, merely revelation of what is in the dark, exposed by his words. The most blatantly political pieces are those called At A Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die, filed from North Carolina, when LeDuff got a job at a slaughterhouse, and reported on the racial tensions between poor whites, blacks, American Indians, and Mexicans employed there. The series was part of a larger one that earned the Times a Pulitzer Prize. He writes: `The first thing you learn in a hog plant is the value of a sharp knife. The second thing you learn is that you don't want to work with a knife. Finally you learn that not everyone has to work with a knife. Whites, blacks, American Indians and Mexicans, they all have their separate stations.' LeDuff, who claims to be half Ojibway Indian and half Cajun, seems to be able to use his ethnic middle ground to slip into places other reporters could not- be they upper or lower crust. Yet, this is not the most political thing about the book- that is how LeDuff seems to brist

LeDuff writes wonderful and insightful sketches of people living and working around NYC in unsual and unexpected circumstances. From native-american iron workers who commute from Canada to work on skyscrapers to fisherman , these are people who are an integral part of city life that can easily be forgotten in the hustle and bustle but LeDuff's portraits bring them into full relief. A very entertaining book that can be opened almost at random and capture your interest. My only critism is that some of the sketches are too short and don't have enough development. LeDuff reminds me of Joseph Mitchell and continues in that tradition of exposing characters in NY that aren't readily visible.

In his introduction to this collection of essays, this Pulitzer Price-winning reporter lists the "fantastic nobodies" hanging from his family tree: "a pair of heavy-drinking lighthouse keepers, a sleepy morphine addict, a grave robber, a rumrunner, a streetwalker, a numbers maker, a dean of a sham college and a police informant." Mr. LeDuff has sought out similar characters here, most but not all of them nobodies and most but not all of them from New York-- a used-car salesman, a florist, a model for Viagra ads, gravediggers, a Sinatra imitator, workers at Ground Zero, the last civilian light house keeper in the country, midgets, bar owners, a "glittering personality of the Harlem Renaissance" who is murdered in her apartment, a runaway, a retiring doorman. a seventy-three year old still employed as a lifeguard et al. Although many of these people are down and out, few are whiners. They are mildly heroic in that they are able to put their feet on the floor each morning and go to a life-sentence job, if they have one. Some of them are homeless. A few of them have their 15 minutes of glory, an alcoholic bum who catches a child thrown by her mother from a burning building, for instance. Mr. LeDuff's prose is sparse in keeping with his subject matter; he is the master of maximum discription with a minimum of words. John Byrnes who caught the baby is "just back from an extended alcoholiday." Someone in a beer hall drinks beer "greedily, like a nursing kitten." Another character is described as "a conscientious objector to the nine-to-five work world."Most of the essays here are two to three pages long so you get the essence of the character quickly. This probably works better if you read the essays in the newspaper rather than going through many of these stories at one sitting since if you aren't careful, you may become suicidal reading of person after person living on the edge.On the other hand, my favorite sections of this fine book are the extended write-ups of the slaughterhouse workers at the Smithfield Packing Company plant in Lumberton, North Carolina and Mr. LeDuff's moving account of the death of Dave Fontana from Squad 1 in Park Slope, Brooklyn on September 11, 2001. There are facts about the slaughterhouse that are mind-boggling. the body and mind numbing repetitive jobs day after day, (you hear people say, they don't kill pigs in the plant, they kill people) the tremendous turnover of personnel, (five thousand quit and five thousand are hired each year) the racial tension in the plant, the racial hierarchy with the best jobs going to white workers, then to the Indians, Mexicans and black workers. Mr. LeDuff writes here about some of the things that happened to people who survived September 11. As he says so well, "the story of death has been well documented in these, the first few weeks following September 1. But there is also the matter of living." He thus takes the reader into how Mr. Fontana's wife and son and his fellow firefighters a

I have followed this writer for years in NY. He is one that was sought out by many- each article he wrote- especially the "Bending Elbows" column. I still get excited when I see his byline. What a great job he does! In NY, LA, anywhere... I look forward to more from this utterly talented and important writer of our time.

This collection of powerful and mesmerizing stories from Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff offers up a paean to the real New York and the seamy, gritty underside that is often hidden from view to the casual observer. "New York is a glamorous city, constituted mostly of nobodies," says LeDuff in the book's introduction, and it is these nobodies that he plucks from obscurity and brings to life in these nervy, punchy vignettes.Partially drawn from his former column in the New York Times, the pieces collected in WORK AND OTHER SINS provide compelling and contemplative portraits of the laborers, dreamers, hustlers and immigrants from the city's uncelebrated ranks of working stiffs. There's the man who replaces light bulbs at the top of the Empire State Building, the last licensed trapper within city limits, the harbor policemen charged with the grisly task of removing dead bodies from the river, the black Santa Claus at Rockefeller Center, and the last civilian lighthouse keeper on Coney Island.In his deeply personal style, LeDuff lays bare the hopes, fears and frustrations of these unsung heroes, offering us an intimate chronicle of lives lived quietly in the shadows. The city around them serves as no mere background player, but instead comes alive as a living, breathing organism in its own right. The author evocatively captures the sights and sounds of the urban landscape, authentically rendering the smoky dive bars, dingy street corners and cramped single room occupancy hotels where dreams are born and extinguished, and the city's dramas are played out.The abbreviated length of the pieces in the collection makes them perfect for reading in short sittings, and LeDuff writes with a keen sense of perceptivity and depth that belies their brevity. In his spare, clipped prose devoid of any false sentiment, he gives us an unvarnished account of real people living real lives, and the result is profoundly moving and compassionate.While many of the stories and characters seem to nostalgically hark back to a vanishing era, there are also some painfully modern snapshots of a post 9/11 New York, including stories about the rescue efforts and debris removal at Ground Zero and a profile of Squad One, the Brooklyn firehouse that suffered devastating losses during the attack. But even in recording these dark times, LeDuff succeeds in finding moments of beautiful humanity, often in the simplest acts and statements of his subjects.In addition to the sheer voyeuristic reading pleasure these essays offer up, they also serve as astute works of social and cultural anthropology, much in the vein of Studs Terkel and Luc Sante. While at their core they are a celebration of the individual, taken collectively the stories form a cohesive oral history of the myriad voices residing on the fringe that deserve to be seen and heard.LeDuff's incomparable take on the city vividly brings to life the culture of the streets and the poetry of the people, leavi