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Who needs
a picture, worth a mere thousand words, when one could read
Dan Barry instead?
Easily
the best literary journalist writing today, Barry captures
one stunningly sublime literary snapshot after another in
his new book, City Lights: Stories About New York.
An
alumnus of St. Bonaventure University's journalism program,
Barry won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in
1994. In 2006, his dispatches from New Orleans earned him
recognition as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature
Writing.
City
Lights collects the best of Barry's "About New York" column,
which he wrote for The New York Times from June 2003
until November 2006. As a columnist, Barry traveled around
the city to explore its unique nooks and crannies and meet
its colorful characters, whom he refers to as "the Congress
of Curious New York Peoples."
But what
Barry found in his travels was not the bigger-than-life Big
Apple, a city that's a world unto itself; instead, he found
you and me.
Barry's
gift is that he always manages to illuminate the ordinary
in the most extraordinary of ways. In doing so, he reveals
the universal humanity that connects us all. He
tells the story, for instance, of a single mom battling illiteracy.
"She was a waitress by day and night, a mom in between, and
tired all the time," Barry says. He
tells the story a sidewalk coffee vendor who "deals in the
language of commerce and coffee.... In winter he freezes,
in summer he sweats, and in all seasons he asks how many sugars."
Barry
never wastes a word. With perfect judiciousness, he knows
just what images to include and just what phrases to turn.
He writes with a journalist's eye for detail and a poet's
love of language. The result reads almost like photojournalism.
"Three
in the morning, and forklifts clatter over rutted pavement,
unloaded trucks sigh in escape, and workers pierce wax-coated
cases with grappling hooks—whup! whup!—as they move
fish from here to there," he writes on the day he visits the
famed Fulton Fish Market.
When
he spends the last day of the season at the city's largest
municipal swimming pool, he notes "a steady rain pocked the
pool's ice-blue surface. The temperature clung to the low
sixties, and the looming sky carried an overcooked oatmeal
cast." When
elephants rumble into the city for their annual circus appearance,
Barry notices that "their eyes, small marbles set in massive
skulls, always manage to convey a mood short of happiness."
Because
each piece originally appeared as a newspaper column, they
only run a few pages. Therefore, their brevity may tempt a
reader to barrel at a rush-hour pace through the book—but
Barry writes in language that can't be rushed. It must be
savored. A
reader who takes the time with each story will see much because
Barry has much to show and much he wants to share. The tales
in City Lights are tales of triumph and tragedy and
pathos, all springing from Barry's remarkable sense of wonder.
"I think
of how extraordinary the city is even at its most mundane,"
he writes.
City Lights is a celebration of Dan Barry's sense of wonder.
Thanks to the humanity his stories reveal, readers can see
that they're never too far from wonder of their own.
(December,
2007)
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