The Heart of the World

Chronicles the author's stroll down the "Great White Way" accompanied by two eccentric guides--a postmodern punk and a cross-dressing hooker--who provide insight into the shocking and saddening population of Broadway

Sometimes sparkling, sometimes disappointing, this tour of Broadway from the Battery to Times Square by British journalist Cohn ( Rock Dreams ) tells the story of the Great White Way through the lives of various eccentric denizens. They include a Russian emigre taxi driver ("Broadway is mother of Broadways all over world," he says), a pickpocket ("Aaron saw stealing--dipping , he called it--as something prideful, a craft, a discipline") and a pre-op transvestite who is about to "marry." Cohn displays a sloppiness with geography rather curious in a book about place; for example, he puts the farmer's market in Union Square "on the east." His voice rambles and sometimes hits bizarre notes, as when he writes, "Where the Pied Piper walked on gilded splinters, press agent Dick Falk strode with cleated hooves." And occasional Briticisms are jarring in an otherwise stridently colloquial American narrative. Still, when Cohn is in top form the reader receives a bold, brash, immediate taste of this special world. BOMC and QPB alternates.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Moody, sweet-spirited survey of lowlifes, castoffs, and misfits along Broadway, from Battery Park to Times Square. Cohn (King Death, 1975; Rock from the Beginning, 1969) embraces everybody, standing up for thieves, transvestites, and grotesques with hearts of gold. In Battery Park, his Virgil is 20- year-old, drum-playing Sasha Zim from Moscow, a cabdriver in ``bomber jacket and Hawaiian shirt, jogging pants, lumberjack boots, a buffalo-head Western belt and a small silver crucifix,'' who learned English from daytime soap operas and says things such as, ``In taxi is university of all mankinds, what you don't know won't hurt you, what you do is killing you dead. Whole world is going Helen Handbasket.'' Sasha introduces Cohn to a Hispanic team of ``Liberty Boosters,'' pickpockets of the Liberty Bay ferry, one of whom is Stoney, who has ``the rapture'' (epileptic attacks during which God speaks to him) and to whom wallets leap if he merely ``consents to receive'' them. Moving into an eight-by-ten- foot room in Times Square's walk-up Moose Hotel, Cohn meets his young, dope-taking alcoholic transvestite neighbor, Lush Life, a vision in Passion Pink nail polish who left home at 15 and forever abandoned her real name of Geraldo Cruz. Cohn gives us much background on P.T. Barnum and his famed museum of freaks, on Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus in Times Square, on the Gilded Age and Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White, on the sins of Robert Moses (whose rebuilding plans for the city, Cohn says, cast whole populations into the street), on the sex shops and the Metropole jazz bar (now gone topless) and McSorley's men-only saloon (now letting in women), and on Times Square's Chess and Checkers Club. He ends on chords that can only be called ashen. Striving like Whitman, not cynical, but at last quite desolate. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This is a compelling and highly original journey up Broadway from the Battery to Times Square. The title comes from an old song about this famous street of broken dreams and promises. Two of Broadway's unique inhabitants--a punk Soviet emigre and a cross-dressing hooker serve as guides. Along the way we encounter many other unforgettable characters from the past and present. Images of the days of P.T. Barnum and the Flora Dora Sextette are juxtaposed with the harsh realities of today's drug pushers and porno merchants. All elements combine to make this a fascinating reading experience. Recommended for larger public and academic collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/91.
-Howard E. Miller, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Missouri Lib., St. Louis
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.