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Lädt ... The Boy Detective: A New York Childhoodvon Roger Rosenblatt
   Keine Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  electrascaife | Dec 4, 2023 |   Instead, The Boy Detective is the meandering musings of Roger Rosenblatt as he reflects back on his life. It's not really about anything, per se, and previous reviews that have referred to it as a series of essays are erroneous: it is more snippets of thoughts, half-poems, and imaginary situations. The idea is that Rosenblatt is literally going on a walk and allowing his mind to wander, as it does. At times, this is kind of fun -- at his best, Rosenblatt has a lot of interesting and insightful things to say about the interiority of the self, the persistence of the childhood self (for him, exemplified by the Detective), how perception of self changes with age and autobiographical writing. He has some less interesting thoughts about his family and New York City in general. Some of the vignettes are simultaneously beyond bizarre and droll such as a hypothetical conversation with Hitler. Overall, because of the choppy and disjointed organization, I found reading the book to be more of a chore than anything else. Some of the paragraphs harken back to earlier passages, so its best enjoyed in longer sittings. Had I not read it on vacation, I'm not sure I would have found it readable. The saving grace is that even in the boring parts, Rosenblatt is a master of language and I found his English so lyrical that it compensates for the content. I still really want to read that other, nonexistent book, though. (  ) settingshadow | Aug 19, 2023 | Since I bought it, I felt I should read it. So I did. It is a cross between a memoir and a collection of essays. There are no chapters, books or sections in the usual sense. Some can be 2-3 pages and some only a few paragraphs. I found it was better to read one or two or maybe three of the pieces, rather than try to read 20 pages as I would normally. Rosenblatt writes of Gramercy Park – the neighbourhood he grew up in. As a boy he would walk the area, imagining himself to be a private eye, pursuing criminals. Observing people walking and creating stories about them. Now, 60 years later, he is walking the same neighbourhoods remembering the earlier years and noting what has changed. He writes of the notable people who lived in the area at various times. Of monuments such as the New York Public Library, the Empire State Building, St. George Hotel – what he remembers from the past. He writes of the everyday people he sees on the street and the dreams he has of what he has seen and done. For me, this was a book to take my time reading. To give myself time to turn over, in my mind, what I had read. It was an interesting book to read. ( ) ChazziFrazz | Dec 4, 2019 |  ) gypsysmom | May 4, 2014 |  ) annbury | Feb 19, 2014 | keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
Auszeichnungen
The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit. Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life and the life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York of the 1950s; the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that nourished the city with water before it nourished it with books, and the Empire State Building, which, in Rosenblatt's imagination, vibrates sympathetically with the oversize loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from me." As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy detective on the case. Just as Rosenblatt invented a world for himself as a child, he creates one on this night--the writer a detective still, the chief suspect in the case of his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3.07)
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I know Rosenblatt gets All The Praise for his “memoirs that read like poetry,” but I just…don’t see it. It feels like he’s trying too hard to be lyrical and clever, so much so that it distracts from the narrative he’s trying so hard to make seem effortless. And the narrative itself is scattered all over the place; he hops from one left-field reference to the next without much connection. If you’re looking for a naturally effortless, lyrical memoir, try Stephen Fry, and if you crave an impressive amount of trivia that seems hodgepodge but is seamlessly woven together, try Bill Bryson. As for me, I found neither here. (