Bartleby and Me

Literary legend (New York) Gay Talese revisits his pioneering career profiling the many nobodies who make New York so fascinating, culminating with the strange and riveting story of Dr. Nicholas Bartha, who blew up his Upper East Side brownstoneand himselfrather than give up his beloved patch of NYC real estate.New York is a city of things unnoticed, a young reporter named Gay Talese wrote sixty years ago. He would spend the rest of his legendary career defying that statement by noticing those details others missed, celebrating the people most reporters overlooked, understanding that it was through these minor characters that the epic story of New York and of America unfolded.Inspiredby Melvilles great short story Bartleby the Scrivener, Talese now remembers the unforgettable nobodies he has profiled in his pioneering careerfrom theNew York Timess anonymous obituary writer to Frank Sinatras entourage. In the books final act, a remarkable piece of original reporting titled Dr. Barthas Brownstone, Talese introduces readers to a new Bartleby, an unknown doctor who made his mark on the cityone summerday in 2006.Rising within the city of New York are about one million buildings. These include skyscrapers, apartment buildings, bodegas, schools, churches, hospitals, and homeless shelters. Also spread through the city are more than 19,000 vacant lots, one of which suddenly appeared some years agoat 34 East 62d Street, between Madison and Park Avenueswhen the unhappy owner of a brownstone at that address blew it up (with himself in it) rather than sell his cherished 19th-century high stoop Neo-Grecian residence in order to pay the court-ordered sum of four-million dollars to the woman who had divorced him three years earlier. This man was a physician of sixty-six named Nicholas Bartha.On the morning of July 10th, 2006,Dr. Bartha had filled his building with gas that he had diverted from a pipe in the basement, and then he set off an explosion that reduced the four-story premises into a fiery heap that would soon injure ten firefighters, five passersby, and damage the interiors of thirteen apartments that stood to the west of the crumbled brownstone.Gay Taleses byline has been synonymous with legendary portrayals of the citys characters, high and low.Bartleby and Mecontinues that tradition, concluding with an examination of a single 20 x 100 New York City building lot, its serpentine past, and theunexpectedtriumphs and disasters encountered by its residents and ownersan unlikely cast featuring society wannabes, striving immigrants, Gilded Age powerbrokers, Russian financiers, and even a turncoat during the War of Independence. Concise, elegant, tragic and whimsical,Bartleby and Meis the capstone of a master journalist.