Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough by Ian Frazier. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 576 pp., $35
Before Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, and Kool Keith popularized rhymes about the Bronx, the local poet laureate was Joseph Rodman Drake, who died at age twenty-five in 1820. Drake name-dropped his turf most famously in “Bronx,” which was posthumously published in Harper’s and contains the memorable lines:
Yet I will look upon thy face again,
My own romantic Bronx, and it will be
A face more pleasant than the face of men.
Thy waves are old companions, I shall see
A well-remembered form in each old tree.
Drake is buried at the center of a park that bears his name in Hunts Point, a semi-industrial peninsula near Rikers Island, his fenced-in grave guarding the last few bucolic square feet in an area now full of warehouses.
Drake’s ability to conjure up deep associations from the landscape guides Ian Frazier through Paradise Bronx, a sprawling combination of cultural hi…