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HAIL
BABYLON!
IN SEARCH OF THE AMERICAN CITY AT THE END OF THE MILLENIUM In his most important nonfiction work since "Road Scholar", Andrei Codrescu takes readers cross-country through the increasingly alluring American urban landscape. From New York and Baltimore to New Orleans and Little Rock--and several cities in between--Codrescu considers "the city as wilderness", a place where the ecology of human desires and the work of the mind find their optimum conditions. |
| From
the Publisher:
Andrei Codrescu, longtime observer and commentator on things odd and American, takes us on a personal tour through our withered yet increasingly alluring urban landscapes. Our trusted, if sometimes irreverent, guide visits New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Little Rock, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon (and points beyond, including Oxford, Mississippi; Salem, Oregon; and California's seaside jewel, La Jolla). Codrescu - while recognizing that cities are under attack by the political right, buffeted by the ever-proliferating prefab town house, beset by crime, and questioned from within - shows us that they are also still flourishing, in fact becoming invaluable models of multiethnic, multicultural living. Taken together, these striking urban portraits sound an extremely hopeful message as Codrescu astutely considers "the city as wilderness," a place where the ecology of human desires and the work of the mind find their optimum conditions. From Booklist, March 1, 1998: Codrescu
is a writer first and foremost, and an extremely sharp and prolific
one at that, but he is also a regular on National Public Radio,
an editor, and a teacher, and has been involved in the making of
documentary films, diverse experiences that help shape the course
of these vibrant and idiosyncratic essays about the nature of various
American cities. Cities, Codrescu writes, are organic, and it is
their life force he seeks to define, often using a city's literature
as a guide. He begins in his hometown of New Orleans, which he considers
to be the "most timeless city" in the country, and presents
mesmerizing commentary on its dangerous sensuality, creeping decay,
and bloody disposition. He then offers similarly incisive sketches
of Oxford, Mississippi; Little Rock, Arkansas; Park City, Utah;
and points farther west, then east. He slips off on such tangents
as an informal, purely atmospheric survey of bookstores in different
locales and an in-depth interpretation of the photographs of Walker
Evans. Acutely observant and nattily gonzo, Codrescu is an enlivening
read. From Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1998: This
series of essays and sketches is more the spirited salutation to
towns and times past (as the title suggests) than an incisive critical
inquiry (as the subtitle promises). NPR commentator and novelist/essayist
Codrescu (The Blood Countess, 1995; The Dog With the Chip in His
Neck, 1996) calls this book a "collection of observations about
cities." "The abandonment of cities," he notes, "would
certainly benefit the political class most afraid of what the cities
contain: blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asians, other ethnics, homosexuals,
bohemians, artists." The Romanian-born Codrescu says the best
features of the American cities he has seen are quite often their
mixed neighborhoods, places where the greatest and most diverse
number of people live, areas where there are lots of bars and restaurants.
Codrescu gives short shrift to the "usual" major metropolises
in favor of highlighting his own preferred Gulf Coast (New Orleans)
and West Coast (San Francisco, Portland) favorites. He celebrates
his adopted home, New Orleans, and its effect on him, and ponders
the idea of nativity ("For practical purposes, I would say
that ten years about suffices to become, if not an insider, at least
a familiar"). Also visited are Faulkner's, and John Grisham's,
Oxford, Miss.; Little Rock; San Antonio; and Albuquerque, where
the author finds nirvana in the chile pepper. He seeks the Zeitgeist
of late-millennium Middle America in its bookstores and notices
that, with their bookstore-cafe culture, big American cities in
the '90s are getting to be just a bit like Paris in the '20s. Codrescu
concludes with a verse remembrance of Boston, described therein
as "a kind of Rome. Only colder," and view Baltimore and
New York, where he has lived and to which he returns frequently,
and asks only not to be mistaken for a tourist. On the whole, pleasurable,
if inconclusive on what makes our cities tick. To Codrescu, the
search is all. |
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