Book Description

Whether writing about a racetrack gambler, a firefighter with a broken heart, or a pair of bickering brothers and their Coney Island bar, LeDuff takes a reader into the lives of his subjects to explore their fears, faults, and fantasies as well as their own small niches of the globe. In doing so, he has expanded the jurisdiction of the news story from competent reports on political campaigns and budget bills to include the love lives of B-rate gangsters and the moral qualms of unapologetic drunks. He has tackled race, class, sex, death, work, and alcohol as topics, to name a few.

Work and Other Sins is a paean to the real New York - not the candied Big Apple of the movies or the flashy neon metropolis of ad campaigns. Here is a book that proves the guy on the bar stool has just as much to say about life as the stiff in the suit.

From Publishers Weekly

At least partially drawn from LeDuff's former "Bending Elbows" column in the New York Times's Sunday City section (available only in the five boroughs), the pieces collected here sketch various habitues of city saloons, mostly working men. Clearly in the grip of some potent nostalgia for John O'Hara, LeDuff is, to his credit, pretty respectful of his subjects-bartenders and lounge singers, bankrupt dot-commers and prison inmates, lighthouse keepers and firemen, homeless freaks and transsexual hustlers-basically anyone who fits into his particular concept of poignant, grubby, overlooked humanity. His carefully dry, clipped style honors their experiences and habits, but with the notable exception of one sequence on immigrant laborers in a Long Island suburb, he does little to advance the interests of his subjects. And while LeDuff does provide a handful of familiar female types-a faded chorus girl, a stricken widow, a runaway teenager, a pair of 50-ish spinsters looking for "Mr. Dreamy" and a few old mamas-the city's female workers evidently don't rate as worthy of the name. LeDuff, who now covers L.A. life and lifestyles for the Times, won a Pulitzer in 2001 for a series on race, and produces some nice counterpoints of prejudices, sentiments, pearls of wisdom, and non sequiturs. "When the cocktail set tells me they enjoy the cast of losers... I smile and drink their liquor. They don't know what work is." That may be true, but it's equally clear, with myriad descriptions like "a Laura Ashley girl gone wrong," that LeDuff is writing for them.

From Booklist

In his first book, LeDuff, an intrepid Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, is a nervy, tough-guy sketch artist, composing concise, punchy profiles of New York hustlers and working stiffs. Spiked with social commentary and graced with frank wonder at the resourcefulness and resiliency of the diverse people he portrays, LeDuff's compelling and entertaining essays create a veritable parade of intriguing characters. There's a good-hearted doorman who worked at the same building for 33 years, a teenage runaway, a florist, a transvestite hooker, an inept pimp, a down-and-out dot-com has-been, Mohawk ironworkers, Latino day workers, slaughterhouse employees, the quirky denizens of an array of drinking establishments from shot-and-beer holes-in-the-wall to the famed Elaine's, the last licensed trapper within city limits, and a gravedigger who observes, "New York can be the saddest place on earth," a theme LeDuff respectfully explores in his somber post-9/11 stories. New York is a "glamorous city, constituted mostly of nobodies," LeDuff writes, but his powerful and mesmerizing stories remind us that, in fact, everyone's a somebody, and every life matters.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Donna Seaman

Book Dimension

Height (mm) 243 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Width (mm) 162