City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide [Hardcover]

Robert Kahn (Editor), Mark Strand (Editor)

Book Description

Series: City Secrets | Publication Date: October 20, 2009

Called "the best literary gift to travelers since the Baedeker and Henry James" (Financial Times), City Secrets guides are charming companions to the world’s most fascinating destinations, from cities to movies, offering discoveries from internationally renowned authors, artists, and historians. Books takes this intimate, insider’s approach to literature, featuring 200 brief essays and recommendations by 150 esteemed figures in the literary world, including authors, writers, journalists, scholars, and critics. The list of contributors includes: Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize–winning author; John Guare, playwright; Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker columnist and author; poet laureates Mark Strand and Robert Pinsky; and Kenneth Turan, NPR and the Los Angeles Times film critic, among many others. Fang Duff Kahn Publishers will donate 2% of the purchase price of each book to First Book, a national organization that gives children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books. It has distributed more than 65 million books to children.

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the creators of the elegant City Secrets guides comes this unique collection edited by Mark Strand, in which esteemed literary figures recommend their favorite overlooked books.

About the Author

Robert Kahn is an architect in private practice. His work includes academic, institutional, residential, and commercial projects, and it has been featured in many leading publications in the field. He is also the creator and editor of the City Secrets series. Mark Strand is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Man and Camel (2006) and Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize. He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and currently teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Universe (October 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789318393
• ISBN-13: 978-0789318398
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 0.9 x 7.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #563,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great gift idea!, November 12, 2009

By 

Greg P. (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide (Hardcover)

This book is a huge collection of interesting recommendations for people who love to read. I'm enjoying my own copy, and I'm going to gift another copy to my brother for the holidays. What a great find!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Favorite writers, October 26, 2009

By 

Blainkennedy "BlainK" (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide (Hardcover)

Wow! A dream come true. Some of my favorite writers recommended their favorite overlooked book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Reviews for Great Books That Deserve More Attention, January 22, 2011

By 

G. Charles Steiner - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide (Hardcover)

In this 367-page sturdy volume with two ribbons for bookmarking and a cloth cover are more than 160 individual reviewers writing about 201 books each has chosen for great but little-known -- or perhaps, little read --- works of literature, and what's so wonderful amid this compact offering is that almost all of the reviews are engagingly written, intimate, and make great literature by themselves.

Mark Warren, writing about Jean Paul Sartre's novel "Nausea" based on his experiences in a small town in Texas, offers an appealing piece of personal writing as he peers into the psyche of an alienated adolescence (which is himself), and is memorable apart from anything he asserts about this French novel of the mid-20th century.

Another review of Jean Rhys's "The Wide Sargasso Sea" by Ernest Hardy actually brought tears to my eyes. Writing about the novel, he says that it "sent me into a weeks-long depression the first time I read it." Later, towards the end of the review, Mr. Hardy writes, "Reading 'Wide Sargasso Sea' left me wounded, open. The impact of the book on my own politics, worldview, and writing is incalculable. It is one of my all-time favorites. And I still can't bear to reread it." Not only did this author inspire me to obtain my own copy of Jean Rhys's novel, but also he made his own words burn in my memory for a lifetime.

Another excellent and inspiring reviewer, Dale Hrabi, has made Elizabeth Smart's 1945 novel, "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept" one of the foremost books for my next purchase. It's a tragic love story, but what Dale Hrabi says about the novel is so significant and beautiful: "At times, the writing has the richness and cadence of scripture. When I slip into the book again, after a few years, I feel I have returned to the High Mass after a stint of sensible agnosticism."

Besides Elizabeth's Smart novel, this collection of reviews has brought to my attention a few other books I'd never known existed -- "Joe the Engineer" (1983) by Chuck Wachtel, a working class novel. Nobody writes the working class novel anymore. Another is "Lights Out in the Reptile House" by Jim Shepard. Move over "1984" and "Brave New World" and make room for this contemporary daymare! While I'm no great fan of Samuel Beckett's writings, the reviewer for "Gogol's Wife and Other Stories" made me want to read Tommaso Landalfi's existentialist fiction.

This collection contains reviews of non-fiction life-narratives, historical works that read like novels, and lots of excellent and fun show biz memories from Ben Hecht to Elsa Maxwell -- and this collection also reviews some books of poetry and travel writing as well.

All in all, the book, though containing nothing but book reviews, was an entertaining and insightful reading experience. There are a few duds and clunkers in the collection -- not even near misses, like the over-intellectualized review of M. K. Gandhi's "Hind Swaray" -- or the reviewer who lavished praise on a book that's about brook trout. No matter how many adjectives were used to describe the book, it was clear the audience for such a book is very limited.

Some books that are known as classics but have been forgotten were given a fresh face-lift and made tantalizingly ready for a new reading by these wonderfully descriptive and personable reviewers. Such works as "Belinda" by Maria Edgeworth (1801), "Columba" by Prosper Merimee (1840), "Bel-Ami" by Guy de Maupassant (1885) and "Cabala" by Thornton Wilder (1926) were all given a contemporary gloss that no serious fiction reader would want to ignore.

I also realized through one reviewer writing about Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" (1941) that if I really do want to understand World War I up close, Rebecca West's historical memoir is nonpareil.

Here's a little secret: I also can't wait to dive into "The Big Love" by Mrs. Florence Aadland as told to Tedd Thornway (1961). It's her tale about her 17-year-old daughter's sexual affair with Errol Flynn! Patricia Marx, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, says Mrs. Aadland's voice here is somewhere between Anita Loos and Nathaniel West, and even she cannot decide if this candid tale is literature or if it's trash!

Buy the book. It's worth every cent and makes a great reading experience.