The Boy Detective audiobook

When writing this book, the author is in the process of teaching a class on memoir writing to students at Stony Brook University. Rosenblatt roams the nighttime streets of his old haunts in Manhattan, specifically the Gramercy Park neighborhood of his childhood. Rosenblatt’s students are told upfront that they should keep themselves out of their memoirs as much as possible. Memoirs should not be about yourself unless it speaks to the reader. A sort of conundrum. I’m sure the class was interesting but had to have been challenging. He goes some way to prove his point by revealing himself as the boy detective, his eight year old self, following clues and researching lives in his neighborhood. His eight year old self wanted to be Sherlock Holmes with a dash of Dashiell Hammett and every other detective he’d absorbed in reading. This childhood detecting obviously connects with his later career as a writer. Style wise—difficult to describe. Often funny. Interesting overall but not for everyone.

I picked this book up at the Strand, mostly because I was interested in how the author wrote about his childhood and especially it's location, New York City. A wonderful read especially on the L train from Bushwick to 14th Street.What's impressive is that the book is both a memoir as well as a study on the nature and beauty of detective fiction. The mixture of his love for that type of literature and location is really great. If you want a narrative that goes from A to B forget about it. This is a haunted look back to childhood and New York itself. Very reflective with a side of noir.

It's official,Roger Rosenblatt is my favourite author.I have never had any desire to visit New York City.Until now.This book is about detectives and books and movies and how to walk meaningfully.If I get to NYC,I would like to spend time with Roger.Or just walk around.

The Boy Detective was a delightful memoir that was written as poetic prose and based on a wandering walk around his home-city of New York. Rosenblatt switches from past to present and presenting the reader with short tales of the people he sees buzzing around New York whilst walking with nowhere to be or go. He also flashes back to his childhood, through the use of the boy detective and reveals bit of information about his childhood and adult life. The short poetic like paragraphs elegantly linked with each other, which I followed page after page. I enjoyed this memoir and the way he wrote it was impressively poetic.

A lovely walk through NYC. Sweet stories and histories. A little too stream of consciousness for me, but still engaging. Thanks for some great film recommendations!

A well-written and intriguing memoir of the life of a boy growing up in New York. It is really good story telling, but I almost think it a shame that New York figures so heavily in the telling

Rosenblatt has written an impressionistic memoir about his New York City childhood. It is not traditionally organized, but is made of random memories which are included for a couple of reasons. One is the fanciful notion that he was a boy “detective” puzzling over mysterious crimes and mysteries which meant, of course, that he had to do his legwork and “spy” on anyone who aroused his suspicions. The other is that legwork literally meant walking around, and Rosenblatt is still walking around six decades later looking at places he remembers from his childhood. The book is a meditation on many things, and its randomness is justified, I suppose, on the grounds that our minds work that way. One thing reminds us of another, and that of another, and so on. Time, of course, is a huge element in this meditation; time can be considered spatially as place rather than having much to do with duration. We move back and forth from one place to another in our minds – sometimes the places are the same, sometimes they’ve changed. Rosenblatt teaches a class in memoir writing, and so he often reflects on his own methods of making sense of his existence, one he readily admits is fleeting and may be of no lasting consequence. “Are we getting anywhere?” he asks. Who knows – a detective has to follow many leads, and a lot of those are dead-ends. After all, for a detective, “life is death” ( deaths, especially odd ones, are what he comes to expect) and “death is life” (his professional “life” is to follow up on deaths). Some of his stories are made up, but it’s always tricky trusting your memory to be accurate, so that’s nothing to particularly worry about. We walk from the present into a past that fits our notions of who we think we are and how we think we got that way – what more appropriate activity for detective rumination? We are “ghosts” of former times in our lives and who is to say if the haunting is real or not. Wasn’t that Hamlet’s dilemma? And the people who inhabited all those places in our past? They all contributed to who we are today but many are like movie extras, those tiny names that flash by at the end of a movie. They appeared briefly in a scene or two and then are seen no more. Or to use a basketball analogy – we may consider ourselves as point guards who handle the ball more than anyone else. But in fact, most of the game is played away from the ball, so in the larger game of life, we’re not of that much significance. THE BOY DETECTIVE is full of such puzzles and musings – a delightful book, one that could be considered serious, yes, but paradoxically it doesn’t take itself seriously.

This is a memoir of a boy playing detective on the streets and of those streets itself, a New York City of the mind, Roger Rosenblatt’s mind, where past, present, future, local and global mix in a more ordered and esthetically pleasing collage than that in How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields. Halfway through this book I started to struggle with why I was enjoying it. There were flights of fancy and digressions and at times it seemed disorganized (which was my major criticism of Shields) yet, I finally doped out, Rosenblatt’s book holds together because those seeming flaws serve the themes of the power and unreliability of imagination and memory. We can trust neither, we need both, therefore, we end up trusting both in a way. It is that way this book is about, for me, and if Rosenblatt’s way includes a few too many digressions and fantasies for me that is all right, for I read it for insight into his mind and by extension into what mind we all share.

If they had 1/2 star ratings this would get 3 1/2. For New Yorkers there are those who grew up in the city-Manhattan-and those who grew up in the other boroughs. I fall into the latter category. For me the problem with this narrative is that if this walk happened during a single night, he walked a hell of a long way for a man of his age. Still it does evoke a lot of memories for me. Although I did not live in the area I did come to it on a regular basis when I was 7 to 12 years old. The only other fault I find with this book is that it is often hard to tell whether he is in his past or the present as he walks the streets. Overall it worked for me and I think it would for others from New York as well.

“Everyone dwells in one past or another, and to a greater or lesser extent, is ruled by it."If you want to know the difference between memoir and autobiography, read this book. If you want a beautiful story, read this book.In my review of The Boy Detective in The New York Journal of Books I describe Rosenblatt as a flâneur in the city—the boy then and the man now.A list of recent reviews can also be found on Richard Cytowic's reviewer page.

The Boy Detective could most accurately be called a memoir. It is composed of seemingly random, train of thought ramblings, but that would be over simplifying. The small snapshots of live in New York are skillfully tied together. The author, now an old man, is looking back on the young boy he once was. He likens his life to that of a detective, trying to solve a life full of mysteries or is it life's mysteries? He likens his life to that of many a detective. Living by his own creed, true to himself and his beliefs, he seeks the answers to a myriad of mysteries. Even as a man, he is still the boy detective on the pursuit. The book was provided for review by Harper Collins.

Rosenblatt walks the familiar New Yorks streets of his childhood and recalls his life in the places and people who once were there. It is a fast moving narrative built around the stuff of detective novels - the idea of clues and discovery. Rosenblatt is a smart, successful guy who was raised in a privileged world. Many would envy him, but he knows deep loss which reminds us what really matters after all.

A charming book floating back and forth between the author as a young boy using detective eyes and thoughts to explore his world, descriptions of New York City when he was a child, the differing neighborhoods and which detectives or authors lived where and his childhood. Told with much warmth and humor.

This book hooked me early and didn't let go. As someone who enjoys walking the streets of New York City, Mr. Rosenblatt's stroll could have been one of my own. Connecting the buildings, streets and scenes to his childhood detective fantasies really brings the city to life. I plan to go through the book again, taking notes, so I can trace his path someday and really see it through his eyes.