The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood

In the grand tradition of Alfred Kazin's A WALKER IN THE CITY, E.B. White's HERE IS NEW YORK, or Frank McCourt's T'IS comes THE BOY DETECTIVE, Roger Rosenblatt's evocative and poignant memoir of his Manhattan boyhood, both an homage to and an elegy for the city.
On a cold winter day in 2011, Roger Rosenblatt left the night class he taught at Stony Brook's Manhattan campus and found himself, on a whim, on a walk through the territory of his childhood. Tramping from Gramercy Park to Irving Place and over and up to Madison Square Park, Roger began to walk not only the city, but the byways and alleys of memory.
In a beautifully wrought series of vignettes that map both his inner and outer landscapes, Rosenblatt evokes with rare precision a disappeared New York, the people who inhabited it, and the larger world of which it was a part, in a moving meditation on what endures, despite time's inexorable forward movement.