The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood

In place of a straightforward chronology, Rosenblatt (writing, Stony Brook Univ.; Children of War) has composed an extended riff on growing up in Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s. The tone of this engaging memoir by the author of five Off-Broadway plays and 12 books, whose honors include two George Polk Awards, a Peabody Award, and an Emmy, is jubilant and lyrical and, at times, almost elegiac. At other moments, the mood changes to humorous and wryly self-deprecating. Woven into the narrative, which isn't at all linear, are reflections on the act of remembering—"By the time you've told any story, fact or fiction, well enough, you've made it up anyway," he concludes. Using the fiction that he is, or was, a detective, a Philo Vance manqué, he guesses at the hidden stories of the people who cross his path in the city; passages in this remembrance of sorts are hilariously funny. The picture that emerges of the young Rosenblatt and those who loved him is benignly forgiving of their all too human failings.