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In the City: Random Acts of Awareness
An award-winning kaleidoscope of a book that "shocks and stirs the urban heart," capturing city life on the edge of the twenty-first century. What kind of person is a city person?
This is a question of increasing importance, Colette Brooks suggests, as the city begins to spread, inexorably, into the furthest reaches of the modern mind. One possibility: a city person is someone "who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the streets."
Someone who is willing, sometimes eager, to immerse herself in mystery.
Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, In the City is an idiosyncratic, lyrical, edgy exploration of the urban experience. This daring, unpredictable work breathes new life into the nonfiction form. Chronicling the often haphazard lives of city dwellers and cities themselves, In the City is a window into the urban psyche.
An unnamed narrator roams the streets of an unnamed city, practicing "random acts of awareness" as she gathers disjointed pieces of the puzzle. She is sometimes in a city that seems to be New York, and sometimes in cities halfway around the world. In her wanderings she collects bits of stories, some taken from the headlines, some from the streets, some from the distant past.
She studies criminals, innocent bystanders, commuters; a renowned painter who fled to the country; a bomber who sends unsuspecting city dwellers lethal packages marked "personal"; a blind, deaf woman who loves to ride the subway; a young cabdriver who keeps an open dictionary at his side as he drives, struggling to learn a strange language; a perplexed explorer who finds himself, against all expectation, stranded at the very edge of the earth.
All of these people, she discovers, are city people, whether they know it yet or not.
Some will flourish, others will be lost, victims of chance and mischance: the woman who drinks by herself in a brownstone apartment; the ancient city dwellers who couldn't outrun fire or flood; the children whose faces end up on posters on a wall. Those who survive learn, sooner or later, that everyone keeps company with ghosts who walk alongside.
In the City shows us that the city is a place where past and present are commingled, where questions rarely have answers, where danger, difficulty, and exhilaration are interwoven in ways we can hardly begin to explain.
Welcome to the city, the place where all contrary indications hold true.
This is a question of increasing importance, Colette Brooks suggests, as the city begins to spread, inexorably, into the furthest reaches of the modern mind. One possibility: a city person is someone "who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the streets."
Someone who is willing, sometimes eager, to immerse herself in mystery.
Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, In the City is an idiosyncratic, lyrical, edgy exploration of the urban experience. This daring, unpredictable work breathes new life into the nonfiction form. Chronicling the often haphazard lives of city dwellers and cities themselves, In the City is a window into the urban psyche.
An unnamed narrator roams the streets of an unnamed city, practicing "random acts of awareness" as she gathers disjointed pieces of the puzzle. She is sometimes in a city that seems to be New York, and sometimes in cities halfway around the world. In her wanderings she collects bits of stories, some taken from the headlines, some from the streets, some from the distant past.
She studies criminals, innocent bystanders, commuters; a renowned painter who fled to the country; a bomber who sends unsuspecting city dwellers lethal packages marked "personal"; a blind, deaf woman who loves to ride the subway; a young cabdriver who keeps an open dictionary at his side as he drives, struggling to learn a strange language; a perplexed explorer who finds himself, against all expectation, stranded at the very edge of the earth.
All of these people, she discovers, are city people, whether they know it yet or not.
Some will flourish, others will be lost, victims of chance and mischance: the woman who drinks by herself in a brownstone apartment; the ancient city dwellers who couldn't outrun fire or flood; the children whose faces end up on posters on a wall. Those who survive learn, sooner or later, that everyone keeps company with ghosts who walk alongside.
In the City shows us that the city is a place where past and present are commingled, where questions rarely have answers, where danger, difficulty, and exhilaration are interwoven in ways we can hardly begin to explain.
Welcome to the city, the place where all contrary indications hold true.
122 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
26 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 19, 2015
How does someone become a city person? Here's one way Brooks thinks it may start:
"A young girl dreams about a place she's only heard of in books, in movies, on TV. It's much bigger than the town in which she's grown up. People in that distant place are busy, happy, never bored... maybe, the girl thinks, there's room for one more.
"She takes the heavy encyclopedia off the shelf and looks the city up, traces its streets, its neighborhoods, its odd unpronounceable names. She wonders, ever so hesitantly, what it might be like to live there. And so the mysterious process has begun: the city is reeling her in."
I put such a long quote at the start because this is me. It might be because I grew up in the middle of nowhere but I fell in love with the city. The city closest to me, the cities I saw on tv. I took notes and learned the names of buildings and reveled every time I got to walk on city streets. I fell so hard in college I majored in urban planning.
So put me down as a hardcore city person. But if you've ever delighted in a metropolis, in any small way, you'll enjoy this book. Described as creative nonfiction it dips into the wells of memoir, delightful facts, and poetic musings. History creeps in but names are left out, making the whole thing feel timeless. It also makes you think - did that really happen? I recognized the guy in the last story, but is this true, too?
"Some claim now that our ancient apprehensions are outmoded, that cities today extend horizontally rather than upward, that height itself is nothing to be feared any longer.
"But I've been to those horizontal cities, and I wonder: isn't zooming along a freeway simply falling sideways?"
It's sad this book isn't better known because I enjoyed it immensely. An enthusiastic recommend to city people everywhere.
"A young girl dreams about a place she's only heard of in books, in movies, on TV. It's much bigger than the town in which she's grown up. People in that distant place are busy, happy, never bored... maybe, the girl thinks, there's room for one more.
"She takes the heavy encyclopedia off the shelf and looks the city up, traces its streets, its neighborhoods, its odd unpronounceable names. She wonders, ever so hesitantly, what it might be like to live there. And so the mysterious process has begun: the city is reeling her in."
I put such a long quote at the start because this is me. It might be because I grew up in the middle of nowhere but I fell in love with the city. The city closest to me, the cities I saw on tv. I took notes and learned the names of buildings and reveled every time I got to walk on city streets. I fell so hard in college I majored in urban planning.
So put me down as a hardcore city person. But if you've ever delighted in a metropolis, in any small way, you'll enjoy this book. Described as creative nonfiction it dips into the wells of memoir, delightful facts, and poetic musings. History creeps in but names are left out, making the whole thing feel timeless. It also makes you think - did that really happen? I recognized the guy in the last story, but is this true, too?
"Some claim now that our ancient apprehensions are outmoded, that cities today extend horizontally rather than upward, that height itself is nothing to be feared any longer.
"But I've been to those horizontal cities, and I wonder: isn't zooming along a freeway simply falling sideways?"
It's sad this book isn't better known because I enjoyed it immensely. An enthusiastic recommend to city people everywhere.
July 24, 2020
Near the start of In the City, Colette Brooks wonders: "What kind of a person is a city person?" and then offers her own answer: "One possibility: the kind of person who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, pieces of stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the street" (2). Well. I'm not so sure about the first part of that, but the end, yes. I think she offers another answer near the end of the book, when she says this: "I suspect that I could collect these strands forever, link one discrete element to another, and still it would seem incomplete. There would always be something else to remark upon, something else to say" (106). I mean: maybe anyone feels that way about the landscape they love best, but a city person is someone who feels that about the built urban environment and its history and all the many lives and stories and secrets it contains. Another answer, maybe: you know you're a city person when you think about the city where you live and, as Brooks puts it, "you simply cannot conceive of your life having worked out in any other way" (9).
I really like the associative way this book proceeds from topic to topic, and the way it mixes the personal and the historical. It's a little about cities in general and a lot about New York in particular and a little bit about other specific cities, too (there's a trip to Brazil that figures in the narrative); not surprisingly, I especially like the bits of NYC history and descriptions of NYC moments and scenery. Early in the book Brooks talks about seeing the Statue of Liberty from what I'm pretty sure is the F train—not that she names either the statue or the train line, but I remember how much I loved that stretch of my commute for the ten years I lived off that train line, the moments between when the train comes aboveground after Carroll Street and when it goes back underground after 4th Avenue. Other NYC things in this book I love: a discussion of what people are reading on the subway, a section about lost & found posters, bits of overheard conversations, a description of the Panorama of the City of New York in the Queens Museum, a bit about the The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 that laid out the street grid. And, though this is from one of the sections in the book about Brazil, I love this: the idea that any city is many individual cities, all "constructed from scraps of memory and invention" (64).
I really like the associative way this book proceeds from topic to topic, and the way it mixes the personal and the historical. It's a little about cities in general and a lot about New York in particular and a little bit about other specific cities, too (there's a trip to Brazil that figures in the narrative); not surprisingly, I especially like the bits of NYC history and descriptions of NYC moments and scenery. Early in the book Brooks talks about seeing the Statue of Liberty from what I'm pretty sure is the F train—not that she names either the statue or the train line, but I remember how much I loved that stretch of my commute for the ten years I lived off that train line, the moments between when the train comes aboveground after Carroll Street and when it goes back underground after 4th Avenue. Other NYC things in this book I love: a discussion of what people are reading on the subway, a section about lost & found posters, bits of overheard conversations, a description of the Panorama of the City of New York in the Queens Museum, a bit about the The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 that laid out the street grid. And, though this is from one of the sections in the book about Brazil, I love this: the idea that any city is many individual cities, all "constructed from scraps of memory and invention" (64).
April 20, 2018
The book starts out asking the question, “What kind of person is a city person?” Colette Brook’s first paragraph says; “a young girl dreams about a place she’s only heard of in books, in movies, on TV. It is much bigger than the town she grew up. People in that distant place are busy, happy, never bored.”
Brook’s tells us “that a city person is one who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the streets”. The voice of the novel wanders the streets of the big cities of the world to find the missing puzzle pieces by listening to conversations, watching the headlines and looking for “random acts of awareness” which are supposed to be the missing pieces of the puzzle.
The voice at one point tells us that it sees. “tourists with cameras, all taking the same shots, and I imagine the thousands of similar photographs that must exist at any given moment throughout the world. Some have been carefully inserted into albums, captioned in countless languages…”
The past and present seem to blur in some of the stories that include, criminals, commuters, and some just sitting in their apartments. One-man mails packages with bombs and another drives a cab studying a new language out of a dictionary at his side.
Apartment dwellers in the city of the 1800’s couldn’t outrun a fire and today some are just alone drinking by themselves in those same apartments. The lives of many seem to turn on a “fork” in the road. On lady feels certain that she see’s a ghost sitting by her on a train. Someone who she had known years ago. City people seem to just accept those forks in the road.
Even the young girl from the first paragraph goes to the city, grows up, and looks out the window at the loneliness she faces and remembers that as a young girl she had a book that explained it all. See the Web Site for more on this book and author. www.connectedeventsmatter.com
Brook’s tells us “that a city person is one who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the streets”. The voice of the novel wanders the streets of the big cities of the world to find the missing puzzle pieces by listening to conversations, watching the headlines and looking for “random acts of awareness” which are supposed to be the missing pieces of the puzzle.
The voice at one point tells us that it sees. “tourists with cameras, all taking the same shots, and I imagine the thousands of similar photographs that must exist at any given moment throughout the world. Some have been carefully inserted into albums, captioned in countless languages…”
The past and present seem to blur in some of the stories that include, criminals, commuters, and some just sitting in their apartments. One-man mails packages with bombs and another drives a cab studying a new language out of a dictionary at his side.
Apartment dwellers in the city of the 1800’s couldn’t outrun a fire and today some are just alone drinking by themselves in those same apartments. The lives of many seem to turn on a “fork” in the road. On lady feels certain that she see’s a ghost sitting by her on a train. Someone who she had known years ago. City people seem to just accept those forks in the road.
Even the young girl from the first paragraph goes to the city, grows up, and looks out the window at the loneliness she faces and remembers that as a young girl she had a book that explained it all. See the Web Site for more on this book and author. www.connectedeventsmatter.com
July 28, 2025
I have a love hate relationship with this book
Kinda a city scape essay by someone who hates cities??
Lots of discussion of death and murder and bad people in bad cities
Ignoring the oft wonders of multiculturalism with all the arts and culture and life that cities breathe
Also weirdly predicted the listicle
Profound yet oddly frustrating read
Kinda a city scape essay by someone who hates cities??
Lots of discussion of death and murder and bad people in bad cities
Ignoring the oft wonders of multiculturalism with all the arts and culture and life that cities breathe
Also weirdly predicted the listicle
Profound yet oddly frustrating read
July 3, 2023
I don’t remember where I picked up this little book, but I loved it! It made me curious about—and appreciative of—so many things. It is chock full of interesting details and observations. Some passages in the book a are bit dated today, but it is well worth reading and pondering…
January 10, 2008
Interesting blend of history, memoir, and stream of consciousness. We follow an unknown narrator through the streets and history of an unnamed city (it's new york). Places and events are described but never named; part of the fun comes in identifying them. But as much as it is an exploration of a city, it also explores the interior of a city dweller's mind, pondering the type of person who chooses to live in a city despite all the crowds, noises, inconveniences, and dangers. A very quick read that would go great with E.B. White's "Here Is New York."
June 23, 2012
Very haunting book. If you think a lot about what it is like living in the city. If you look at what everyone else is reading on the subway. This book is for you. Thought provoking.
I love that I found it in a 2nd hand store (Housing Works in Chelsea) had never heard of the book, the author, just took a chance on the book. Random reading.
If you can find it, I recommend it.
I love that I found it in a 2nd hand store (Housing Works in Chelsea) had never heard of the book, the author, just took a chance on the book. Random reading.
If you can find it, I recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews