A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin
A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin
List: $15.99 | Sale: $11.20
Club: $7.99

A Walker in the City

Author: Alfred Kazin

Narrator: Steven Jay Cohen

Unabridged: 5 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/28/2023


Synopsis

A literary icon's "singular and beautiful" memoir of growing up as a first-generation Jewish American in Brownsville, Brooklyn (The New Yorker).

A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new.

With vivid imagery and sensual detail—the smell of half-sour pickles, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses—Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this working-class community, and his eventual foray across the river to "the city," the mysterious, compelling Manhattan, where treasures like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum beckoned. Eventually, he would travel even farther, building a life around books and language and literature and exploring all that the world had to offer.

About Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin, the author of numerous books of criticism, taught at Harvard and Smith College.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Oriana on December 20, 2020

Of course I've vaguely heard of this book forever, but I had to have it literally thrust into my hands to actually start reading it. I'm only a smidge of the way through (although this book is so short, a smidge is probably 1/4), but it's staggeringly evocative, both of turn-of-the-century Brooklyn......more

Goodreads review by Bryan--The Bee’s Knees on July 28, 2019

I've never been much of a fan of memoirs, something about them has never resonated with me. It doesn't help that the genre seems to be jam-packed with so much celebrity dross, political maneuvering and self-help sob-stories nowadays--that's not to say that there can't be something genuine lurking in......more