"I wanted to look at Sinatra for the several things that he accomplished, above all as a musician. Yes, he was an interpreter of other peoples’ songs, just as Pavarotti is, or Billie Holiday was. I’ve heard much music sung by people who wrote their own music, and not all of it is good. Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, John Lennon, the Rolling Stones: these are superb artists. But when I listen to hip-hop, I don’t decide to consign Sinatra, Lady Day, Nat Cole and others to the trash bin. Sinatra brought to pop music a distinctly urban voice, from the cities where the children of immigrants were making their presence known. In roughly the same period, Fiorello LaGuardia, Joe DiMaggio and Sinatra drove the Italian organ grinder and his monkey off the American stage forever...There was something else to the tale: Sinatra’s audience at the beginning was primarily female; it ended up primarily male. He helped humans trained to silence — or emotional numbness -- to express some of their deepest emotions."

"Reporting is the heart of the matter. The great Murray Kempton called it “going around”. Journalism is, as the cliché goes, history in a hurry. But it can be more. American reporting, in its great phase, starts (I believe) with Stephen Crane. Many of his early pieces are in “The New York Sketches of Stephen Crane” You can see later how he moved past journalism by looking at the newspaper story he wrote that was later turned in “The Open Boat”. Even newspaper columns, at their best, use reporting as the authority for their opinions. The great editors recognize reporting talent and try to sharpen it, improve it. No newspaper editor would ever say to a youngster: “There’s too much reporting in this piece.” When the work is at its best, it also become “literature in a hurry.” I always think of the line of Ezra Pound (dreadful, of course, on politics and society but smart about writing). In “The ABC of Reading” he wrote “Literature is news that stays news.”"

• North River (2007)
• Downtown : My Manhattan (2004, nonfiction)
• Forever (2003)
• Why Sinatra Matters (2003, nonfiction)
• News is a Verb (1998, nonfiction)
• Snow in August (1998)
• Piecework (1996, nonfiction)
• A Drinking Life : A Memoir (1995, nonfiction)
• Loving Women
• The Guns of Heaven (1984)
• The Deadly Piece
• Flesh and Blood
• Dirty Laundry
• The Gift
• A Killing for Christ