Ian Frazier’s signature voice — droll, ruminative, generous — draws readers in. But his underlying subject here is even bigger than the Bronx: It’s the way the past “bleeds through” the present.
That’s how I imagine a lot of people might react to the thought of reading a 500-plus-page history of the Bronx, the only borough of New York City attached to the mainland of the United States and, therefore, the drive-through borough.has been “sliceand dice” and “almost destroyed” by interstate highways, expressways and parkways. But read the opening chapter ofand I think it’s a good bet that, like a car stuck on the Major Deegan Expressway, you’ll stay put for hours, except voluntarily.
In between, Frazier vacuum-packs over five centuries of facts and stories about the Bronx. He devotes an extended section to the crucial role the Bronx played in the American Revolution and especially revels in the borough’s “boom era” of the early 20th century, when immigrants fled the jam-packed Lower East Side to “Paradise Bronx”: Streets were filled with kids playing stickball, and on every corner stood a candy store spouting forth egg creams.
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