Letters From Brooklyn

A tour book, but not a tour book. A collection of letters, but more than a collection of letters. "Letters From Brooklyn" comprises an informal yet informative memoir of one couple's three-year walk through New York City.

Robert P. Laurence and his wife, Susan W. White, left their San Diego home for New York when she got a job as an editor with ProPublica, a journalism nonprofit in Lower Manhattan.  He was already retired from his job as a TV columnist, and more than happy to spend a while wandering the city.  Bob explored the sights on weekdays and they walked together on weekends. He chronicled their travels in a series of more than 80 e-mail letters to friends and relations. His e-mails grew into a blog, which evolved into this book, "Letters From Brooklyn: A Slightly Irregular Memoir of Everyday Life in New York With a Tour Guide Thrown In."

Bob and Susan thought of themselves as long-term tourists, visitors with time on their side.  They might not catch the Metropolitan Museum's blockbuster Picasso show this week, or even this month, but they wouldn't miss it.  As the weeks and months went by, they visited sights that many of their New York friends, some of them native New Yorkers, had never seen, from McSorley's Old Ale House in Greenwich Village to the Duke Ellington statue in upper Manhattan to Teddy Roosevelt's boyhood home and Brooklyn's hardware shop-art gallery. This journal being nothing if not real, Bob also wrote about Gotham's everyday problems usually ignored by tour guides, from snow-jammed streets to alternate-side parking to the Brooklyn office of the New York Department of Motor Vehicles.

Taken together, read as Bob wrote them, the letters form a mosaic in words, a portrait of the city seen through his eyes as he explored it day by day. And he's included hyperlinks to all the places they visited, making "Letters From Brooklyn" the ideal guide for the New York visitor to keep handy on a Kindle or iPad while strolling through the city. 

Whether you're a first-time visitor or a jaded long-time New Yorker, whether you're visiting the Empire State Building or the Ex-Lax Building, you'll want to check out "Letters From Brooklyn."