“The city - as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place - has, in turn, been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane. In the fast lane, the passive observer reduces everything - streets, people, rock lyrics, headlines - to landscape. Every night holds magical promises of renewal. But burnout is inevitable, like some law of physics.”

“IN the book of my heart, pages keep falling out, many of them marked "Mom and Dad.”

“The novel and the film of 'The Color Purple' are both works of the imagination that make claim to historical truth.”

“Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'”

“The city - as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place - has, in turn, been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane. In the fast lane, the passive observer reduces everything - streets, people, rock lyrics, headlines - to landscape. Every night holds magical promises of renewal. But burnout is inevitable, like some law of physics.”

“'Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.”